Matt Brown looked at the UFC 334 main event, Ciryl Gane against Josh Hokit for the undisputed heavyweight title, and said out loud what a lot of hardcore fans have been muttering over their third drink. The winner gets a belt. He doesn’t get to be the best heavyweight on the planet.
The retired UFC welterweight made the case on the latest episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer, and he didn’t bother hedging. “The fact is it’s very f*cking disputed,” Brown said of the title. “These guys are fighting for second place unfortunately.”
He’s right. If anything, he’s being polite about it.
Follow the belt
Trace where this strap has been. Jon Jones held the heavyweight title after he ran roughshod over Gane. Tom Aspinall held it next, then gave it up after an eye poke in his own fight with Gane put him on the shelf for more than a year. Gane was crowned undisputed champion earlier this year on the back of that mess. Back in June he was on the South Lawn at the White House for UFC Freedom 250, in an interim heavyweight championship fight, with Joe Rogan holding the microphone. Interim belts. My favorite accessory.
Then there’s Francis Ngannou, who plenty of people still rank as the No. 1 heavyweight in the sport. He left the UFC in free agency and took that argument with him.
So the belt Gane and Hokit are fighting over has passed through a man who beat Gane, a man Brown says was winning against Gane when the eye pokes ended it, and it never got anywhere near the guy many fans consider the true top dog. Brown put it plainly.
“The real uncrowned champ is somewhere between Jon Jones, Francis Ngannou and Tom Aspinall. Right?” Brown said. “Three guys that we’re not getting to see fight.”
His comparison was better than anything I’ve heard from a broadcast booth this year. “Just as a hardcore fan of this sport, a lover of this game and fighting, it just feels like we’re taking these wild-card teams and putting them in the Super Bowl.”
That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Wild-card teams win Super Bowls sometimes, and nobody hands the trophy back. But everybody remembers which teams stayed home.
Where I’d push back, a little
The “second place” tag lands on Gane and Hokit, and neither one did anything wrong by signing the contract. The top three aren’t available. Somebody has to fight for the belt, and the guys who say yes are the guys who get paid. I’ll always have more respect for the fighter who shows up than for the hypothetical champion living rent-free in a group chat.
Brown knows this. He was clear that it’s still going to be a great fight, and he pointed out that names like Alex Pereira and Alexander Volkov are part of the current picture. His gripe is with the perception, the part where fans look at that whole group and shrug that Francis, Tom and Jon would beat all of them. That’s fair as a ranking argument. It also doesn’t score a single point on fight night.
Why the UFC should want Hokit
This is where Brown gets sharpest, and where I’m fully with him. He thinks a Hokit win is the cleanest outcome for the promotion, even if the people running it won’t lose sleep either way.
“The ideal scenario for the UFC is absolutely Josh Hokit wins,” Brown said. “Do they care? Are they going to get emotionally invested in it? I don’t think so. They’re businessmen.”
The reason is Gane’s résumé, which comes with footnotes on footnotes. “There’s a lot of baggage including [Ciryl Gane] losing to Jon Jones,” Brown said. He went on to cite the Pereira controversy, which he framed as a debate over behind-the-head punches, though Brown thinks Pereira was pretty much done anyway and Gane had him beat. Then he circled back to the eye pokes with Aspinall.
That’s three separate asterisks on one champion. Gane has had a lot of bites at the heavyweight apple, and if he wins again, every title defense he ever makes gets introduced with a paragraph of context. Hokit winning gives the division a new face with none of that luggage attached.
It also makes the eventual Aspinall return easier to sell. Brown said he thinks Aspinall would have a better chance coming back and beating Hokit than beating Gane, and that he suspects most people feel the same. “Tom Aspinall’s the uncrowned champ,” he said, for the second time in about a minute, in case anybody missed it.
Nobody missed it. Whoever walks out of UFC 334 with the belt, the first name he should say in the cage is Tom Aspinall’s.
