A clash of lighter-weight legends was planned for the Rio card in Brazil, but fell through.
You’re not the only one to scratch your head at the UFC 301 co-main event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil featuring Jose Aldo vs. Jonathan Martinez.
Aldo is a legendary champion — he was a dominant WEC featherweight champion, the first UFC featherweight champion, and he defended that title seven times. Martinez is a 10-3 veteran but has fought just twice on a UFC pay-per-view. So why match them up?
It turns out the original plan was much more interesting: Aldo was set to face Dominick Cruz, whose bantamweight accolades match Aldo’s featherweight ones. Unfortunately, those plans never came to fruition.
“Obviously it would’ve been good for me, for Dominick, for all the fans and the media who had been asking for this fight for such a long time,” Aldo said in an interview with MMA Junkie. “There’s a lot of history around a fight between myself and Dominick, but Jonathan Martinez is a very tough opponent and what really matters to me is I look at every fight like I’m fighting the best and I’m fighting the biggest challenge. That hasn’t changed.”
Now what’s most interesting about this fight is what comes after — Aldo confirmed it was the last bout on his UFC contract, and he’s excited to get back to boxing.
“I’m looking at maybe a big boxing fight maybe somewhere down the line later this year,” he said. “But we’ll revisit that with the UFC once this fight is done with Jonathan Martinez.”
Aldo has gone 2-0-1 in boxing since his two year retirement from MMA, and reveals how close he came to fighting Floyd Mayweather in Saudi Arabia.
“That fight with Floyd Mayweather was basically all set and done,” he said. “Ali [Abdelaziz] was the one that was negotiating that and I don’t really know what happened and it ended up not panning out for us to fight in Saudi Arabia.”
“But there’s a big [Tyson vs. Paul] event on Netflix later this year, and hopefully, I can get on that. But we’ll have to see. There’s a lot of options floating.”
First he’ll have to defeat Jonathan Martinez on May 4th.