UFC: Max Holloway details his weight cut, defends the commission

UFC Featherweight champion Max Holloway was apparently at a striking distance of making weight for his UFC Lightweight championship match against Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 223.

The weight-cut concerns, however, led the New York State Athletic Commission to pull Holloway from the card and the commission had received a lot of criticism for the same. The show, however, went on as planned with Al Iaquinta coming in as a last-minute replacement for Holloway.

And now that the smoke has settled down, Holloway appeared on the MMA Hour last day and detailed about his weight cut.

“I never thought it was going to be impossible. It never once crossed my mind. It was harder than most [cuts] for sure. But I was just bigger, that’s it. I had a little bit more body fat on me than I usually do. It was just new experiences. It was nothing crazy. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to die!’ or things like that — never ever. This is part of the game, it was just harder than most [weight cuts]. We took the challenge knowing the consequences. We went out there and we did the damn thing. We got stopped, we got pulled and the sh*t hurts. It’s been a hurtful year for me so far. I’d never pulled out of a fight in my life and then I got two pulled on me, two big ones too. It’s a tough pill to swallow right now.” Holloway detailed.

The commission is there to protect the fighters

The Hawaiian then went on to defend the commission and said that people should not go hard on them.

“Everybody keeps giving the commission a hard time, but they’re there to protect us. They’re there to protect us for our own good. Who knows what would have happened if they let me go? But they checked vitals before, they did a vital check in the morning. The last one, they just didn’t like the way I looked. They called it, man. Tough. It was a tough one,” he added.

Holloway is 19-3 in his career so far and the UFC 223 debacle was his second straight fight cancellation after his fight with Frankie Edgar at UFC 222 also fell apart a few months back.