Damn, Alexander Volkanovski.
Perhaps in the near future we can come up with a fuller checklist for UFC GOATs, which includes not only championship reigns and pan-divisional titles and records and win streaks and finishing rates, but the ability to come back from the dead.
Advertisement
The thing is, the dirt had been shoveled on “Volk.” There were eulogies being dispatched from Abu Dhabi in 2023 when he got knocked out by Islam Makhachev in their short-notice rematch. By the time Ilia Topuria knocked him out in Anaheim four months later, the obits themselves were well-preserved artifacts. Amid Topuria’s ultimate coronation, Volkanovski’s name slipped into the bygone canon of has-beens.
It’s a strange thing to say about a rugby convert who lost 70 pounds to fight at featherweight (the equivalent of a healthy golden retriever) and become a (five-time defending) UFC champion, but this is where Volkanovski’s story gets interesting.
After Topuria vacated his 145-pound title to jump up to lightweight, “Volk” was fed to Diego Lopes for the vacant title, a tomahawk feather who was destroying everyone in his path. It was meant to be Lopes’ turn to make his name off a former champ.
In fact, Lopes told me one night in Brooklyn that he wanted to get Volkanovski more than anything, all but licking his chops as he said it. He saw it as a favorable matchup that would gain him the most amount of juice in kicking off his own era. He got his wish. It was a spirited fight, if a little dull at points, but Volkanovski beat him on the scorecards. The rematch that nobody wanted played out even more emphatically in Volkanovski’s favor, which didn’t prove anything other than the fact that Lopes didn’t really have a plan B for this mulligan.
So when the UFC booked Volkanovski against the undefeated Movsar Evloev, it felt like the revival act was soon to end. Evloev was a cold reality check imported straight from the Sunzah, in the Republic of Ingushetia, a region in the heart of Russia. That sounds as serious as it is. Evloev had overpowered all 10 of the men he’d faced in the UFC, included a pair of contenders in Aljamain Sterling and Lerone Murphy, and he was six years younger than Volkanovski.
Advertisement
Yet Volkanovski advocated for Evloev to get the fight anyway, and even agreed to meet him in “Volk’s” own personal house of horrors: Abu Dhabi.
Disadvantage?
Nah, this will go down as one of his greatest tricks to date.
To solidify his status as the best featherweight of all time — and as a top-five UFC great of all time — he needed to take out a guy nobody wanted to face.
In the only place on earth where “MOV-SAR!” chants could be heard in backdrop to the action, Volkanovski gave Evloev something to think about in the opening round Saturday at UFC 333, winning it with footwork and shutter-speed combos. Yet in the second round, when the chants kicked up in earnest, he snatched a man’s soul. Evloev took him down but couldn’t hold the champ there for more than a couple of seconds.
Advertisement
Later, when Evloev shot in again and dragged “Volk” to the canvas, he learned something of “Volk’s” preternatural dimension.
He got reversed, and the room began to spin as he fought off his back. Evloev, who took Murphy down nine times down the stretch of their fight back in March, wasn’t going against a willful tackling dummy; he was going against Australia’s great Venus flytrap. “Volk” invites you in, to play your strengths against him, only to break your spirit. He turned Evloev’s strength into a delusion, which is the true dictation of wills.
The punches Volkanovski delivered that set up the beginning of the end hammered the point home — we weren’t watching a brilliant second act, but the best champion the division has ever known. Better than Jose Aldo. Better than Max Holloway. Better sustained. Better conditioned. Better skilled. The competitor was never dead, in other words, and as he put Evloev away with ground-and-pound at the end of the second, you couldn’t help but start to reflect …
