Welcome back to This Fucking Guy, where we here at the CME take a long, hard look at someone in the MMA world with the hope of answering the question: this fucking guy, what is his deal? Today, in advance of his main event bout with Yair Rodriguez at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night, we look at former featherweight champ Max Holloway.
Ready for a statement of fact that will shake you to your very core? Jerome Max Keli’i Holloway is, at least for the next few weeks, still in his twenties.
How?! How is that even possible that he’s still only 29? It feels like he’s been in the UFC longer than that (when in fact it has been merely about a decade). It also feels like he’s got such a fun-loving middle-aged dad vibe, bringing his son Rush to various events and posing for the cameras to show off the fact that they have the exact same hairline. The man seems like a wizened veteran of this here game. He’s already had a memorable run with the UFC featherweight title, several classic fights, and enough individual UFC records that the promotion has basically had to create a separate category – fights not featuring Max Holloway – in order to give anyone else credit for impressive striking stats.
And you’re telling us that he’s not even 30 yet?? All this dadness, this fight experience, this venerable air, and he’s still just half a Randy Couture?!? It doesn’t seem possible. And yet here we are.
If you really want to shock your whole system, go back and watch the video of teenage Holloway talking about how he first got into MMA. You think he was baby-faced when he showed up in the UFC at 20, after making his pro debut at 18? Here he looks like a damn zygote.
But the other thing from that video (aside from the fact that they sent him into a fight with three days of training) is, clearly teenage Max has already had to grow up pretty fast. You hear him talking about his mom’s drug use, his dad’s total absence in his life, the domestic violence he’s grown up with, and you get a sense that this kid has been through it. Then you see the man he is walking around now and you almost can’t help but be struck by the overwhelming joie de vivre and shit. Here’s a guy who had every reason to become darkly bitter early on in life. But his defining feature as a person has always been his downright fucking radiant positivity and warmth. How the hell did he do that?
It’s especially noticeable when you start comparing him with peers. You might say this business naturally lends itself to dark, negative, awful shit. The whole thing is built on a physical expression of conflict, and often the most reliable way to generate headlines is to drum up a blood feud with other fighters. We’ve seen fighters desperately claw for attention by purposely being raging assholes. [https://comainevent.com/2021/11/04/this-fucking-guy-colby-covington/] Yet how many times can you recall Holloway really getting heated before or after a fight? Quick, tell me who Holloway’s most hated rival is? In a sport that turned the idea of “bad blood” into a tired-ass cliche long ago, Holloway has managed to be a marquee fighter without any of that.
And it’s not a gimmick either. He’s not out here trying to Sam Alvey his way into our hearts. Part of the reason for his popularity is that after you listen to him in interviews or watch him in fights, he genuinely come away feeling like you know who he is as a person – and that person is good.
Of course, another part of his popularity is based on kicking copious amounts of ass. Sometimes fighting Holloway can look like fighting a swarm of bees. There you are swatting at the air and still getting stung somehow everywhere all at once. This is a guy who’s done his training camps via Zoom. This is a guy who’s been adamant about telling other fighters they spar too much and should save their brains. Even the people he’s beaten to sad, bloody pulps can’t really hate on the guy, and the vibe he exudes is that of a the life coach you didn’t know you needed.
More than anything, what stands out is how genuinely happy he seems to be, even in this, a sport not known for producing happy, well-adjusted individuals. It would be easy to view that happiness as a by-product of his success. But what if it’s the other way around? What if being such a positive motherfucker is a big part of how he got here? Because that seems entirely possible. Way more possible, in fact, that him doing all this stuff and living all these different lives in this sport before he’s even hit his 30th birthday.
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