Alexander Volkanovski is 11 days out from a title defense, and he spent some of that time letting a fictional agent take a swing at Dana White’s checkbook. The UFC featherweight champion teamed up again with Sportsbet.com.au for a short comedy video in which he stars in a run of fake movies, and the sharpest line of the whole thing lands on fighter pay. MMA Fighting posted the clip Tuesday.
The pay joke comes courtesy of Beverly, the nemesis from Volkanovski’s earlier Old Man Volk bits, who is back this time as his hard-nosed agent. She chews him out for taking a low-profit independent film. Volkanovski defends it as a labor of love, saying “That was a passion project,” before admitting, “But yeah, to be honest, I don’t know what I was thinking.” Beverly’s verdict: “It was a flop.” Then the punchline: “But it still made more than what Dana pays.”
The rest of the reel is a parade of genre parodies. It opens with Volkanovski as Alexander the Great, a dig at the recent hit The Odyssey. Volk jokes about Matt Damon working with Christopher Nolan, whom he calls Nolesy, and offers to let the Greeks show everyone how it’s done. When he’s told he looks like a man who has seen the horrors of war, he points to the two fights that defined a stretch of his career. His answer: “I’ve seen Islam Makhachev. Twice.”
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There’s also a space movie called Going the Distance, where the gag is that nobody can take him down without any ground to land on. A James Bond spoof titled Submission Impossible has him warning an opponent to stop watching his hands and start watching his feet. A Miami Vice riff called Miami KO rounds it out.
What’s next
The acting thing is apparently more than a bit. Volkanovski is part of the ensemble cast of the Street Fighter reboot, which premieres worldwide this weekend, according to MMA Fighting. The following Saturday, Oct. 24, he headlines UFC 333 against Movsar Evloev, who brings an undefeated record into his first crack at the belt.
That’s a busy October. A global movie premiere and a five-round title fight against an unbeaten wrestler inside of roughly a week is a schedule most camps would hate, and Volkanovski seems to be treating it like a Tuesday.
My take: the Dana line is the headline, and it’s a good one, because a reigning champion can say it with a smile and a sponsor logo and nobody gets fined. But the bit I keep coming back to is the Submission Impossible warning about the feet. Put that line in front of an Evloev fight and it reads as a scouting note. Evloev’s whole game is chaining level changes until you stop defending them, and Volkanovski’s best nights have come from reading entries early and punishing them on the way in. If his feet are as sharp on Oct. 24 as his comedic timing was in this clip, Evloev’s zero is in real trouble. I’m taking Volkanovski.
