Jorge Masvidal and Ben Askren are sharing a room again, and this time nobody is getting carried out of it. The two men tied together forever by the five-second flying knee at UFC 239 sat down for a conversation about their fight, according to a clip posted to r/MMA early Friday under the full_send_mma name. Dovy, who covers the sport on X as @DovySimuMMA, flagged the reunion a little earlier in the night, writing simply that the pair had linked up.
The clip is billed as the two of them talking through the fight that put both their names in the record books for very different reasons. Neither post includes a transcript or pull quotes. Any specific lines about the buildup, the knee itself or what came after will have to come from the full video, and you won’t find them invented here.
Where the road went after that night
Askren’s career took a turn toward the money. Yahoo Sports pointed out this week, in a column on Sean Strickland’s frustration with UFC pay, that Askren was the first MMA fighter Jake Paul pulled into boxing. He cleared seven figures doing it, according to that piece, and he did it only months after hip replacement surgery. Funny how that detail keeps resurfacing. Strickland is now openly floating a Paul fight of his own, and the Askren payday is part of the math fighters keep citing.
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Masvidal’s later years have been rougher in the results column. Bloody Elbow, writing about Colby Covington’s current Real American Freestyle run, noted that Covington lost four of his last six UFC fights and that his only two wins in that stretch came against Tyron Woodley and Masvidal. Masvidal then crossed over to boxing and lost to Nate Diaz in 2024, a card that also featured Anthony Pettis on the undercard. Pettis is now headed to RAF 15 in Chicago on Nov. 28 for a wrestling trilogy with Donald Cerrone, which tells you how far that whole generation has scattered across combat sports.
So the two guys from UFC 239 have ended up in the same broad orbit. Both found boxing paydays after their UFC peaks, and both ran into the Paul and Diaz side of the fight business. Now they’re trading memories on camera instead of trash talk.
I’ll watch every second of this, mostly because that knockout is the cleanest stoppage argument the sport has ever produced. There was no referee to second-guess and no corner to blame. Nobody had to ask whether it was early or late, because the whole fight was over before most of the arena had sat down from the walkouts. Five seconds is the number on the record, and years later the two men who made it are still talking about it together.
