Justin Gaethje’s long-time coach Trevor Wittman has revealed that the star’s interim lightweight title fight against Paddy Pimblett in the main event of UFC 324 later this month could be his last, depending on the result.
“I’m not feeling it, I’m just saying it,” Wittman told ESPN. “The whole thing is I want to keep everybody grateful and Justin’s a very smart guy. He understands and he’s the one that I can have conversations with. A lot of the times when you have a conversation with a fighter—I want to have that conversation with a lot of guys—I don’t want to break their mentality. Justin’s like one of those unbreakable mindsets. He’s very smart when it comes to how his family feels about fighting. He’s also very smart when it comes to longevity. All combat sports, all contact sports bring long-term issues. The No. 1 thing is this is first a hobby, second a career, and then you’ve got to leverage it, and Justin’s very smart when it comes to stuff like that. So when we have these conversations, it’s man to man, and I’m not afraid to speak it out loud.
“This is our last run. If we don’t win this fight, we’re not going on. We’re not going to go out there and be a gatekeeper and look at money fights and sh*t like that.”
That being said, if he beats Pimblett to claim the interim title then there is still an appetite to continue competing, while still being mindful of the fact that at 37-years-old he can’t go on forever.
“He would fight over and over and over, but he knows he’s got to be there for the family,” Wittman said. “He’s got to be smart and take care of his health, but we win this belt, my shoot-to-the-moon type of goal would be let’s go out there and repeat defenses. Repeat defenses.
“Obviously, this is an interim title fight, so we’re not the champ yet, so we’d have to go win that belt next. I always say the key to being the champion is one round at a time. One round at a time gets you one fight at a time. once you get to one fight at a time, then you start to get to the championship level. So we’re not overlooking this, but we’re honest that it gets to a point where we have that roadblock, we can’t overcome those roadblocks no more. He’s 37 years old and we want to be smart.”
It does seem wise for Gaethje to be weighing up whether he wants to fight on at this stage or not as his all-action style and willingness to repeatedly get punched in the face in order to land his own was always going to take a toll in the long run.
To be fair to him though, Gaethje has stood the test of time well up to this point as he’s won three of his last four fights, and continues to compete at the top end of the lightweight division, but his previous fight with Holloway in 2024 did end in a dramatic last-second KO loss.
As such, a timely exit rather than crashing out after a run of tough losses seems like a good game plan, but for Wittman it’s important that Gaethje doesn’t head into his next fight expecting it to be his last.
“This is not a retirement fight,” Wittman clarified. “When it comes to retirement fights, I think anybody going out on a retirement fight is going to win one out of 10 times, because you’re already letting go. He’s not letting go.
“He was just in his position, where we were, we had just been knocked out for a year, we had a title fight, they offered the fight with Max, he didn’t want it. Pretty much everybody around the fight, including myself, was like, ‘Hey, this is an opportunity to go out there and do your thing from that upper echelon,’ which, when you’re told something, it’s never guaranteed, we know that. But Justin’s one of those company men that he’s always done right for the company and for the fans and he’s a people fighter. His goal when he first got with me was like, ‘Every time I fight, when you buy a pay-per-view or you buy a ticket to be in the arena, you’re going to be so grateful that you bought that ticket.‘ And he’s done that.”
