At 29-years-old, former featherweight champion Max Holloway isn’t planning to retire any time soon, but when he eventually does he expects it to happen after competing at a different weight class.
So far Holloway has only experimented with moving up to lightweight once, and it ended in disappointment with his first loss in 13 fights against Dustin Poirier back in 2019.
Holloway quickly retreated back to the 145lb division, but it seems that he’s still interested in returning when the time is right.
“When we took that Dustin fight, (it) was like on a two months’ notice, a little bit under two months,” Holloway told ESPN’s Ariel Helwani this week. “We did that fight and then two months later, I was fighting back at ’45.
“The intriguing question to everybody is, ‘When is Max gonna commit to ’55 fully and not do this jump around stuff?’ Let everybody wonder, right? We’ll see what happens.”
It doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen right away as Holloway is still on the path of attempting to win back the featherweight belt.
He only came up just short of reclaiming the title in his rematch with current champion Alexander Volkanovski last year, losing out by way of a somewhat controversial split decision verdict before then turning heads with an incredibly dominant win on the scorecards against Calvin Kattar to start 2021.
However, it does seem like it’s only a matter of time before he does commit himself fully to a title push at lightweight too.
“I think I end my career at ’55 and fully commit at ’55, or maybe even I’ll fully commit at ’70. Who knows? We’ll see what happens. It’s just commitment. My coaches, they want commitment. I want commitment, the UFC wants commitment. We’ll see what happens.”
