Joaquin Buckley has a proposal for the fighters who keep tossing around racial slurs, and it involves a DJ booth and zero bodyguards.
In a video that Championship Rounds circulated on X on Sunday (credited to @Newmansa94), the UFC welterweight contender called out Sean Strickland, Dustin Poirier, Max Holloway, Alexander Volkov and Josh Hokit by name. His challenge was simple. Walk into a club, which Championship Rounds described as an all-black club, take the microphone and say the N-word out loud. Buckley told them to “Get in the DJ booth, no security,” and said that if any of them actually went through with it, “I’ll shut the f*ck up.”
The video lands in the middle of a growing argument over slurs coming out of combat sports athletes’ mouths, and Buckley clearly decided he’d heard enough from guys who say these things from behind a keyboard or a press row.
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One of the names on his list had already poked at him first. On Saturday, a day before Buckley’s video made the rounds, Strickland posted on X: “Who is more racist.. Me or Joaquin Buckley?” Strickland has never been shy about saying the quiet part at full volume, so it’s no shock he ended up at the top of Buckley’s list. Whether the post triggered Buckley’s response isn’t spelled out in what’s circulated so far, but the timing doesn’t look like an accident.
The rest of the list is a strange collection of people who are dealing with other things right now. Holloway is busy getting cursed out by Conor McGregor, who went off on him this weekend and is pushing to face him in what McGregor framed as his final UFC appearance. McGregor said Holloway “didnt engage once” and added, “If you’re not a world champion fighter, don’t even utter my f*cking name.” Holloway also got a mention from Ilia Topuria, who listed beating Holloway among his accomplishments while calling Alexander Volkanovski the best featherweight ever.
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Hokit, meanwhile, already has Ciryl Gane on his case. Gane said in an RMC Sport interview, as reported by Red Corner MMA, that Hokit’s trash talk won’t get to him unless Hokit goes after his mother. Luke Thomas summed up the likely result on X: “Well, now he’s going to target her, dude.”
None of the circulated material spells out why Poirier and Volkov made the cut, and I won’t guess. Buckley named them and that’s the record.
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My take. I’ve spent 30 years pricing things that might happen, and I can tell you the odds on any of these five guys strolling into that DJ booth without security are about the same as my 2019 parlay cashing. Buckley knows it, which is the whole point of the dare. A dare like this tells you nothing about who’s tough. Its value is that it forces everybody to admit there’s a gap between what gets typed and what gets said face to face. The next move belongs to Strickland, who already showed he’ll post first and think never. If he answers this one on X, it’ll be from a couch and not from a club.
