Max Holloway is not done at lightweight

UFC featherweight champion Max Holloway was unsuccessful in his recent lightweight debut, giving up a hard-fought decision to Dustin Poirier. Despite this setback, he’s not done in the division.

Speaking to MMA Fighting this week, the featherweight king divulged that he has every intention of fighting at lightweight again in the future — and perhaps in even heavier divisions.

“100 percent [I will return to lightweight],” Holloway said (via MMA News). There’s a future for me in the heavyweight division just watch me. It is what it is. That first fight, it’s not how you start the race, it’s how you finish.

“I’m contracted as a 145’er with a belt and I didn’t want to be holding up people or holding up a division. That’s why I came back. If they want me back at 155, who knows? The main event slot is 170. You don’t know what happens fight night. I’ll fight my fight and if they need someone to hurry up and go out there and fight, ‘Blessed’ is here.”

Holloway added that he learned some crucial lessons in his fight with Poirier — lessons he carried into his more recent fight with Frankie Edgar.

“I learned a lot about myself in that fight,” Holloway explained. “I dug deep. I’m a fighter. I’ll fight heavyweight if I like. I did things and stood in front of him that guys in his weight couldn’t do. There’s a lot of things we took away from that fight and it’s only a loss if you don’t take anything away. We took a lot away.

“I learned. It’s either win or learn and that’s what we did. I learned a lot in that fight, I learned a lot about myself. I learned about my team and coaches and we came back strong. We took everything we learned from that fight and brought it into the next fight [against Frankie Edgar] and you saw how that went.”

Max Holloway is set to return to action at UFC 245, where he’ll battle Australia’s Alexander Volkanovski.

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 10/9/2019.