Max Holloway recently lost the symbolic ‘BMF’ title and is now setting his sights with a blockbuster fight against Conor McGregor.
Holloway lost on the scorecards to McGregor all the way back in 2013 at an early stage in their storied UFC careers, and ‘Blessed’ now thinks it’s time to run it back.
“I mean Conor’s there, Conor got one over me,” Holloway said of McGregor on his YouTube channel. “He’s talking about coming back. I’m coming off a loss. It would look pretty fun to get that one back with him.”
One glaring issue with that suggestion is the weight difference as these days McGregor prefers to compete at 170lbs, while Holloway has never been above 155lbs, but he doesn’t have a problem with moving up.
“I know a lot of people are worried about the weight and this and that,” Holloway said. “If he doesn’t want to cut weight then I don’t want to cut weight. We can do it at any weight to be honest. It’s just about getting it back.
“At the end of the day, that would be a fun fight but we’ll see what happens. We’ll see what way the UFC wants to go and that’s all we can do.”
In the wake of Holloway’s comments, industry insider Ariel Helwani believes there’s a real chance this fight could happen sooner rather than later.
“Max [Holloway] is very cerebral, Max is very calculated when he says things,” Helwani said on his show. “Charles [Oliveira] isn’t getting that [McGregor] fight after that [BMF title] fight. I don’t even think Conor wants a BMF title. I think Max is trying to tell us something there.“
“With Nate [Diaz] out, it feels like [Holloway] is trying to tell us like, ‘This is what I want.’ And I don’t think he’s talking if things aren’t happening behind the scenes. These talks are going well, and I think they’re going well because the UFC recognizes, ‘Hey, we need to make this happen.”
Helwani also suggested that all signs are pointing to the UFC pulling out all the stops to get McGregor on the UFC 330 event on July 11th during International Fight Week in Las Vegas as they look to push back against criticism over their UFC: White House card and a new competitor in Netflix with their Rousey vs. Carano event.
“I told you about the meeting [between the UFC and McGregor] two weeks ago, I told you it went well, Petsey [Carroll] told you it went well,” Helwani stated. “At this point, I think it would be safe to say it would be a disastrous situation, something disastrous would have had to have happened if he was not fighting on Jul. 11.”
Watch Helwani’s thoughts on the matter in full below.
