If Anthony Pettis were a cat, he’d be down to his last life right now.
For a professional athlete? Let’s just say he’s done a lot of living in a very short time.
During a roller coaster decade as a top-level fighter, Pettis has experienced enough highs and lows for 10 men. At 29 years old, he already feels a world removed from the fresh-faced youngster who punched his ticket to the big time with a leaping, springboard kick off the side of the cage to the face of Ben Henderson.
After that audacious introduction at WEC 53 in 2010, Pettis went on to win the UFC title at lightweight, considered the organization’s most competitive weight class. He became the first MMA athlete to grace the cover of a Wheaties box. He was one of the first to score a lucrative individual endorsement deal with Reebok after the company became the official outfitter of the UFC.
He enjoyed basically every perk available to a young fighter whose powerful bosses anointed him the future of the sport.
And then he lost it all.
When Pettis enters the cage to fight Max Holloway for an interim featherweight title at Saturday’s UFC 206, it’ll be as a man who—right up to the point this short-notice bout was announced less than two weeks ago—was hanging by a thread.
He fought just once each year during 2014 and 2015 and missed so much time due to injury people began to wonder if an inability to stay healthy would end up defining his career.
When Pettis did make it to the cage, the results weren’t much better for him. Starting with the loss of his title to Rafael Dos Anjos at UFC 185, he dropped three in a row from March 2015 to April 2016.
This disastrous stretch was capped by a unanimous-decision defeat by Edson Barboza at UFC 197 that had many of Pettis’ former admirers wondering if perhaps we’d misjudged him.
Perhaps he wasn’t one of MMA’s hottest prospects after all.
From the sound of it, Pettis was wondering the same thing.
“I was depressed. I was like, ‘This is what I do. This is what I pride myself on—[being] the champ of the world. Now I’ve lost three in a row,'” Pettis told ESPN.com’s Brian Campbell recently. “It’s a weird place to be. You find out a lot about yourself when you lose. You find out how good you really are.”
In August 2016, he cut from lightweight to featherweight and finally snapped his losing streak, scoring a unanimous-decision win over Charles Oliveira at UFC on Fox 21.
It was a good win—and one that Pettis absolutely needed to keep himself relevant in the larger UFC landscape. On the other hand, it wasn’t the sort of victory that was going to blast the dust from everyone’s eyes and rocket Pettis back to the top of the charts.
Oliveira himself had once been a highly touted up-and-comer, but Pettis caught him in the midst of a 1-3 slide. So Pettis’ decision nod over him felt more like a momentary reprieve than the win that was going to completely revitalize the former champion’s slumping career.
On the plus side, though, it set him up for bigger and better things.
Namely: this.
Fast-forward to UFC 206, and fate has intervened for Pettis in a fairly staggering and unforeseen way.
An injury to light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier caused a scheduled title defense against Anthony Johnson to be scrapped at the 11th hour. UFC matchmakers were left scrambling for a replacement to headline the second-to-last pay-per-view of the year, from the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on December 10.
Days later, a series of somewhat mysterious events was announced.
Just a couple of weeks after defeating lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 to become the first man ever to simultaneously hold two UFC titles in two different weight classes, Conor McGregor was unceremoniously stripped of his featherweight belt.
At the same time, Jose Aldo was promoted to “undisputed” 145-pound champion, and Pettis vs. Holloway was installed as UFC 206’s new main event.
Exactly why Saturday’s fight is for an interim title remains unknown, besides the obvious assumption that in Cormier’s absence the UFC needed a championship fight with which to try to sell this flagging PPV.
The winner here is assured of nothing more than a future opportunity to fight Aldo for the belt McGregor was forced to leave behind. Since we have no reason to assume that eventual unification bout will be delayed, Pettis vs. Holloway rightly seems more like a No. 1-contender fight than any kind of “interim” anything.
But if you’re Anthony Pettis, you’re probably not asking those kinds of questions right now.
For Pettis, this fight represents a massive opportunity. It’s a gift horse he should steadfastly avoid looking in its horsey mouth.
Pettis is a guy, after all, who as recently as that loss to Barboza less than eight months ago was considered on the verge of being washed-up. He had fallen so far, so fast we had no choice but to consider him a failure of the UFC public relations machine.
In one fell swoop, he now has the chance to vault himself to the forefront of his new division. Regardless of what the rest of us think about the validity of this interim title, it gives him the prospect of joining a select handful of other fighters who have become champions in two different UFC weight classes.
Considering where Pettis was before this fight and where he might be after it, it’s almost unprecedented.
Granted, fellow former lightweight champ Frankie Edgar fought Aldo for the title in his first fight in the featherweight division at UFC 156 in 2013 and on the heels of two losses. Then again, Edgar hadn’t dropped nearly as far in the public consciousness as Pettis has. Edgar’s pair of losses were both title fights and both achingly close.
Because of that disparity, Pettis’ chance to reverse his own fortunes has to be considered even more momentous than Edgar’s.
All he has to do is beat Holloway on Saturday night.
Of course, that’s far easier said than done.
Holloway comes into this matchup amid an eight-fight win streak. If there’s a surprise entrant into this surprise title fight, it certainly isn’t him. In fact, the makeshift main event of UFC 206 could easily have been a title fight between Holloway and Aldo if the UFC could have thrown it together in time.
Pettis is going off as a slight underdog, according to OddsShark, and for good reason. Holloway is one of the hottest fighters at 145 pounds right now. At 25, he’s already long been considered a future title challenger.
Independent of any championship talk or extenuating circumstances, their bout figures to be a crowd-pleaser. It’ll match two exciting, high-energy strikers in a situation where the spoils of victory are great and the perils of defeat likely seem unthinkable.
For Holloway, this is the moment he’s been waiting for since his current run of victories began in January 2014. It will set him up for a long-awaited clash with Aldo and the chance to become undisputed champion.
After that, who knows? Perhaps a lucrative rematch against McGregor—who handed Holloway his last professional loss in August 2013—could even be in the cards.
For Pettis, this fight represents something even more precious.
It’s a chance to completely reinvent himself one more time.
The way things have been going, he’s probably not going to get too many more of those.
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