Julian Erosa spent the opening seconds of his final fight on the canvas and the closing seconds on top of JeongYeong Lee, swinging. The official result was a KO at 1:31 of Round 1 at UFC Vegas 123 on Oct. 31. It closed a 16-year pro career at 32-13 overall and 10-9 in the UFC, and it earned him a Performance of the Night bonus on the way out. Then the 37-year-old set his gloves down in the middle of the Octagon at the Meta Apex, and his wife and son came in to meet him.
Why he picked this night
Erosa told Cageside Press before the card that the location was deliberate. He and his wife moved to Las Vegas to chase the fight career, and his third UFC opportunity came in the same building, against Sean Woodson at the old Apex during the 2020 pandemic, when nobody was in the seats. Finishing there with an actual crowd, close to his coaches and teammates, was the full-circle part.
The bigger reason is his son, who is two and a half. Erosa said he wants to stay cognitively sharp for him and for grandkids down the line, and he put it bluntly: “When I’m 60, I don’t want to forget what his name is and that kind of stuff.” He also told Cageside that watching Darren Elkins, a man he beat a couple of years back, go through his own retirement fight pushed the timeline up. Erosa said Elkins’ interviews struck him as a little sad, whatever the result. Hence the line he’d clearly been sitting on for a while: “I wanna retire from fighting. I don’t want fighting to retire me.”
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Bloody Elbow reported he’ll be helping with his mother’s business. After the fight he said he felt like he could fight again tomorrow, but that enough is enough at his age. Coach Eric Nicksick hugged him, and the gloves came off almost immediately, which reads to me like a guy making sure the decision stuck before the adrenaline could argue with him.
How the fight went sideways, then right
Nobody was handing him this one. Bloody Elbow counted it as his 16th fight as an underdog in 45 pro bouts. He was coming in off back-to-back losses, and MMA Fighting’s staff predictions had Lee winning. The one thing on Erosa’s side of the ledger was activity: Lee, seven years younger, was returning after more than a year away.
The opening exchange went how the odds said it would. Cageside Press and MMA Fighting both described a left hand from Lee that dropped or badly stumbled Erosa almost right away. (Essentially Sports called it a right, so take the hand with a grain of salt. The result on the canvas was the same.) This is the risk Erosa always carried. His UFC record includes first-round knockout losses to Devonte Smith and Seung Woo Choi, so getting clipped early against a fresh striker was a live scenario, not a fluke.
What he did next is the part I’d show a student. Per Cageside, Erosa got back up, pressed Lee into the fence and went looking for a takedown. He didn’t get it. MMA Mania wrote that Lee had him on skates and nearly locked up a choke in that stretch. My read is that the clinch was never really about the takedown. Tying up a hurt opponent’s hips on the cage takes away the space Lee needed to throw his power shots, and every second spent wrestling is a second for the legs to come back. It’s an in-round adjustment made with his brain half scrambled, and it worked even though the takedown never came.
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Once they separated and went back to trading, Lee made the mistake. Cageside described him looking very confident with his hands down. The UFC’s broadcast account called the finisher an overhand right, MMA Fighting called it a looping right, and either way it came over the top of a lowered guard. Lee went down, Erosa jumped on him with follow-up shots, and the referee was right behind for the stop.
Here’s how I read the whole sequence. Lee did the hard part, hurting a veteran in the first few seconds, and then fought like the work was done. That’s what a long layoff can do to a fighter’s sense of urgency and danger. Erosa has a long history of winning ugly fights after being in trouble, including a third-round D’arce choke on Woodson and a third-round submission of Charles Jourdain. Hurting him has never been the same as beating him. You’d better keep your hands up until the ref is physically between you.
What 145 loses
The featherweight division loses one of its most useful phone numbers. Erosa got his third UFC run as a late replacement for Kyle Nelson against Woodson, and he took the Jourdain fight on short notice when Lerone Murphy fell out. He was cut twice, came back twice, and has The Ultimate Fighter and Dana White’s Contender Series on the same résumé, which almost nobody can say. Wins over Nate Landwehr (first-round TKO), Jourdain and Woodson are the ones that got him a longer leash the third time around.
He also cashed two checks from other people’s bad weight cuts. Steven Peterson came in at 149 for their 2022 fight, Hakeem Dawodu came in at 149.5 for UFC 279, and both paid Erosa 30% of their purses. He beat both men anyway. Francis Marshall missed by two pounds on this same card, so the tradition of featherweights treating 146 as a suggestion is clearly in good hands without him.
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For Lee, it’s a rough return. He was the favorite, he had the finish half built, and now he heads back into the division off a knockout loss after more than a year on the shelf.
The detail I keep coming back to is that Erosa’s most famous fight, against a young Paddy Pimblett for the Cage Warriors featherweight title in 2016, was one many fans thought he won before the judges gave it to the Brit. His last one left the judges nothing to score.
