Jorge Masvidal has $200,000 riding on Josh Hokit. Masvidal says he’s holding a ticket on Hokit to beat heavyweight champion Ciryl Gane at UFC 334, and he says that slip pays out $1 million if the challenger wins.
Yahoo Sports and Forbes both carried the story. According to Masvidal, the ticket is physically in his pocket, which is either a great flex or a terrible place to keep a million-dollar piece of paper during fight week in a crowded city.
The math tells you how the books see this one. A $1 million return on $200,000 puts Hokit somewhere around 4-to-1 or 5-to-1, depending on whether that million counts the original stake. Either way, Masvidal is backing the guy nobody’s supposed to pick, against a champion fighting for the heavyweight belt this weekend.
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Fight week so far
Hokit has not exactly been hiding. He and Gane faced off for the first time in Times Square on Tuesday, and MMA Junkie’s footage shows the two trading words in front of the crowd. A day earlier, Spinnin Backfist posted a clip of Hokit slipping straight into character the moment he spotted Poatan.
Then came the media scrum. Speaking with Ariel Helwani, Hokit was asked how he’d respond if Gane tried anything dirty, and he answered with an escalating chain of retaliation that started at the eye and ended somewhere in Europe.
“If he pokes my eye, I’m gonna hit him in the back of the head,” Hokit said, before working his way up to a closing line: “If he finds my family and kills them, I’m going to France and conquering them.”
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That’s a fighter answering a question straight, even if the answer took a detour through several felonies.
Hokit also explained to Helwani why he still sleeps in the dorms at Jackson Wink during camp despite his recent success. He said he grabbed that room two years ago and keeps all his stuff there, so moving into a house never made much sense. He pointed to the convenience of having the cage and the mats right outside his door, the altitude, and access to coaches Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn.
He was also honest about the conditions. “There’s something about a cockroach crawling across the floor, a crackhead outside keeping you up at night, that reminds you of how it all started for you,” Hokit said.
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So the guy fighting for the heavyweight title is living in a gym dorm with bugs, and a famous ex-fighter is betting enough on him to buy that gym a new building.
The take
I love this bet. A heavyweight title fight is the one place in the sport where a 4-to-1 ticket can turn into a winner with one clean shot, and Hokit is the type who’ll stand in front of a champion and throw it. Gane is still the favorite for a reason, and Masvidal could be out $200,000 by Saturday night. But if Hokit lands, the most expensive piece of paper in the arena will be sitting in Masvidal’s pocket.
