The Contender’s Climb
At different crossroads of their careers, Max Holloway and Anthony Pettis will collide for more than a manufactured championship.
With ten seconds left in his last fight, Max Holloway planted his feet and pointed his finger at the floor. For the previous fourteen-plus minutes, he had overwhelmed Ricardo Lamas, his sharp strikes and purposeful footwork making a fool of the top-five featherweight. For the first time in the fight, Holloway stood still. Without words he made a pact with his opponent that had struggled mightily to connect with a clean shot. You want to hit me, he said silently with his sharpening eyes and menacing point to the canvas. Here’s your chance. Hit me.
For those next ten seconds Holloway left his crafty footwork at bay and engaged in a violent tornado of flesh and leather. He and Lamas tucked their chins and teed off on each other’s skulls with winging hooks and haymakers. After landing and eating a handful of stinging shots Holloway pointed at the ground again, the adrenaline palpable in the slight space between the two men, and ricocheted one last rocket off Lamas’s head before the bell rang and the referee ended the primitive chaos.
In a cruel game where years of progress can be erased by a single punch, Holloway’s stand seemed to send a message more to the world around him than to Lamas: I’m Max Holloway, and you can hit me all you want. But you won’t keep me from what I’ve earned.
“Earned” is a common word among contenders. To climb the rankings in any division is to gamble on one’s own abilities, to put your conviction concerning merit and status at risk with every lonely walk to the cage. Many fighters chase not the champion, but rather the moment they can say with confidence that they have earned a shot at the champion’s crown. When that opportunity is delayed, as it so often is for those worthy challengers, confidence often gives way to frustration and the fair first nature of many is to complain.
Max Holloway, at 25 years old, has as good of a claim as any to be disgruntled. The Hawaiian has won his past nine fights without being granted a shot at the increasingly convoluted featherweight crown. After going the distance in a loss to Conor McGregor back in 2013, Holloway has evolved with every performance. He grows not only in between fights but during them; there are few fighters that possess the Hawaiian’s ability to adjust with the flow of a contest, growing more dangerous and rendering his opponents more ineffective with every passing exchange.
He could have been granted a title shot after he dismantled Cub Swanson in April of 2015, picking apart the veteran striker before finishing him with a crushing guillotine choke. That victory was his sixth in a row at the time, a streak that few in the loaded featherweight division can ever hope to replicate. Rather than holler complaints from the sidelines, Holloway ran through three more dangerous opponents with little resistance.
Holloway, wise beyond his years and almost impossible experienced, understands the game he’s in. He hears the loud objections of his peers before they’re stifled and shuffled to the bottom of the deck, and he refuses to become another complaining pawn. Many fighters believe in varying degrees that they are the best fighter in their class. Rather than project a belief in his own greatness, Holloway elects to defend his conviction in the cage as if it is the gold belt so many chase.
“I ain’t owed shit,” Holloway said ahead of his next bout, which if successful will be his tenth win in a row. “Anything you ever want you go out and go take it. And I’m going to take every single thing.”
In August, Anthony Pettis choked out jiu-jitsu black belt Charles Oliveira to the tune of an exploding Vancouver crowd. When he stood, his face was solemn in relief. He paced around the cage, his eyes heavy and slightly sunken above swollen cheeks and a bloodied nose. He looked up at the lights like a man who had less won a fight and more delayed his own burial. Like victory was some lost old friend whose faded footprints he’d been chasing.
Seventeen months prior, Pettis was one of the sport’s kings. A dazzling striker and baby-faced champion, he dominated highlight reels and cereal boxes alike. And then, in its typically cruel and sudden way, the sport threatened to pass him by.
He stepped into the cage with Rafael Dos Anjos in March of 2015 as a lightweight champion and left broken-faced and beltless. The Milwaukee product found no room for his electrifying kicks and flashy submissions that night, his body beaten and face fractured by the Brazilian’s vicious pressure. Before the first bell Pettis was an ambitious climber at the peak of the mountaintop, and for twenty-five minutes he watched the edge grow closer and then slip beneath his fingertips.
Having tasted the air at the top of the clouds, Pettis fell into the trap of a former champion — he chose not to invent an improved self but rather to reclaim his old heights. In January of 2016 he was not dismantled by Eddie Alvarez but his powers were yet again extinguished. Alvarez glued himself to Pettis against the cage for the better part of fifteen minutes, and the former champion looked lost and confused. It was as if his title loss to Dos Anjos had been a faraway nightmare rather than reality — he appeared unaware that the blueprint to defeating him had already been broadcasted to the world.
In a way the Alvarez loss was an even more discouraging defeat. In going five rounds with Dos Anjos he was unsuccessful in technique but strong in will — his championship heart never gave out even as the bones of his face did. When he left the cage after fifteen minutes with Alvarez, Pettis wore neither the relieved glow of victory nor the zippered flesh and sunken eyes of a war lost. Because of his own inability to adapt, he had barely fought at all.
Admittedly jaded by the nature of his last defeat, Pettis took his next fight less than three months later. In Edson Barboza, a pure striker, Pettis found himself in a matchup where he would never have to stray from the world he thrived in. There would be no smothering against the fence, no gasping for air and grasping for space on the mat with a heavy wrestler on top of him. It would be a contest competed at range, where Anthony Pettis could live up to his “Showtime” moniker.
The contest did not stray from its predicted form, yet again Pettis was bested. For the first time in his career, the kickboxer was outstruck in his preferred realm of initiation. He was gunshy, and when he did commit to an attack he ate a thunderous left hook that forced him back into a state of timid circling. When he did throw his flashy, cartwheeling techniques he missed mightily and often ended up slipping to the floor. Those moments of attempted magic were hard to witness — even he seemed to know they would fall short, yet in a matter of last resort he knew only to reach desperately into Showtime’s old bag of tricks. After fifteen minutes, the left hooks had left a thin tear of blood down the side of his face and Barboza’s leg kicks had turned the inside of his thigh a ghastly blend of blue and black.
With his third loss in a row, Pettis’s fall from grace had reached the ground floor. He announced his move to the featherweight division, which many followers greeted with skepticism.
But to Pettis, the drop in weight brought the removal of the shackles of expectation. His featherweight debut was not flawless. But over two-plus rounds, shades of Showtime returned. He punished Oliveira with his trademark body kicks before finding the finish in the final round. His shoulders shed the weight of those three defeats. He had found a new beginning, and a path to the peak of a new division.
It is fitting that Max Holloway was deep into training camp when he learned his next bout had been promoted to a title fight.
The forever contender was content to ignore the frivolous theatrics that surrounded the featherweight division’s title picture; Undisputed champion Conor McGregor was M.I.A., settling scores at welterweight and making history at 155 lbs.; Former king and then interim champ Aldo was threatening retirement for being slighted of a rematch with the Irishman that had ended his reign with one laser of a left hand. Leave those issues for the headlines, Holloway figured. He was in this game to fight.
When the UFC 206 light-heavyweight main event was scrapped, it created a domino effect that was felt mostly by the featherweights: McGregor was stripped, Aldo was promoted to undisputed king again, and Holloway’s bout with Anthony Pettis would become an interim title fight for the sake of promotional push.
To some fighters, receiving an unexpected shot at a gold belt would be reason to celebrate. To Holloway, it meant a potential ten extra minutes to prove he was the best featherweight in the world, and a sparkling ornament to bring home for Christmas.
“It is what it is, who cares,” Holloway said when asked about the ramifications of the interim strap, what it means for a future fight with Aldo, which of the two champions is the real champion. “The belt is great, it’s freaking pretty, it’s beautiful. You get a nice pretty payday too so I ain’t complaining. Most people tell me it’s the real belt, but I don’t push myself out there with that kind of noise. I got a fight to win.”
Anthony Pettis too holds no illusions about the significance of a fabricated title. The former lightweight champion is hungry again, and not only because of the extra ten pounds he’s shedding. When he was tumbling down the lightweight ladder, he couldn’t help but grasp for the shadow of his old glorious self. He now carries the psychology of the contender, chasing a brand new dream. The ghosts of those losses will enter the cage with him, in the attic of his mind rather than heavy on his shoulders.
“This is my stage. This is my time to go out there and remind everyone who I really am. I have a lot of fight left in me.”
The promotion will push this clash of strikers as a battle for a gold belt. But to neither man is that the singular prize they visualize in the sweatstained hours in the gym or in the quiet moments at the end of their nights.
Pettis seeks validation, the chance to kick this fickle game in the ribs for threatening to pass him by. He lost his belt, but the champion never died in his mind. At UFC 206 he will be the underdog for the first time in years. As the fight draws closer and his cheeks hollow, his eyes glaze over with a wolfish glint, a predatory hunger. With the right performance he can add a fresh coat of paint to the nickname inked across his back, introduce Showtime to the world again.
Holloway looks to stay in the trenches and eradicate yet another contender. For fleeting moments he allows his tunnel vision to widen, to consider the bigger legacy he’s carving out for himself. At twenty-five, Max Holloway is not a man of modest ambitions. When he does get the title, the real one, he wants to have already left the featherweight top-10 in bruised ruins. Any fighter that wishes to slow his train to the top is welcome in the cage with him, regardless of rank. To them he offers the same message he sent to an outclassed Ricardo Lamas: Swing away. I’m not going anywhere.
