“There’s a lot of fun fights (at lightweight),” he said. “There’s a new undisputed champion that we have some history with. There’s a bunch of guys I have a history with here in the top five. Life’s good at ‘55. I can’t wait.”
He’s not getting ahead of himself, though. First comes the task of Poirier, a man who bested him twice. First was in his UFC debut when Holloway stepped in for Ricardo Lamas as a fresh-faced 20-year-old. The next loss came seven years later when the two locked horns for an epic interim lightweight title fight at UFC 236. The back-and-forth affair was granted Fight of the Night honors, but the judges scored the fight in Poirier’s favor, and Holloway went back to the drawing board.
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While the results are fair, they don’t come without some justifiable caveats. Neither man was even close to a finished product in the first bout. In the rematch, the physical difference between Poirier, who had spent the last several years in the lightweight division, and Holloway, who remained at 145 pounds, was stark. Holloway accepted that fight with about two months to prepare, objectively not enough time to reshape one’s body for the monsters in the lightweight division like Poirier, who often walks around and enters the Octagon a lot bigger than what he tips the scales at on Friday mornings before the fight.
