Desert Island Fights | Part 5

Accuse me of the recency bias on this one if you must, but I defy you to explain to me how this BMF belt classic won’t be on all manner of ‘Best Of’ lists until the end of time.

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If you had seen this bout in a Hollywood movie, you’d laugh and say, ‘that could never happen,’ which just makes it all the more unreal. I mean, just watch the reaction of Holloway and Gaethje’s UFC peers on the video embedded below this paragraph. You know it’s a singular moment when the best fighters in the world can only express disbelief.

Holloway had dominated most of the fight and really only needed to get on his bike in the waning moments to secure the BMF belt for himself. So why—why—did he invite Gaethje, one of the scariest men to ever fight at lightweight, to go full Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in the middle of the Octagon as the seconds ticked down?

“If that’s not a BMF moment, I don’t know what is,” Holloway would say later. “These are the types of things you do to etch your name in the history books.”

To be perfectly candid, if you only gave me the Dustin Poirier fight library for my isolation on a desert island, I’d be 100% happy. Show me when the guy was in a boring fight. They’re all bangers, they’re all interesting, and win or lose, they’re all edge-of-your-seat.

That’s certainly true of this bout, a rematch with Max Holloway for the interim lightweight title. I was fortunate enough to be in the venue that night in Atlanta, and I recall somewhere after the final bell that I was dizzy for having held my breath for nearly the entirety of the 25 minutes. Watch it again and you’ll see why.

This Fight of the Night co-main was easily the highlight of the  Saitama Super Arena festivities back in 2017, and remains an all-time classic. Both fighters had lost their chance at strawweight gold to the great Joanna Jędrzejczyk and were eager to show they still had what it takes. And boy, did they.

Gadelha’s elite BJJ certainly had its moments, but it was really a night that started to separate Andrade’s striking from the rest of her peers at 115 pounds, to say nothing of the numerous WWE-style body slams throughout. Andrade still regards this performance as her favorite among her nearly 40 pro fights and it’s easy to see why.

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This is as good a strawweight bout that exists, and that’s a hill I’ll forever die on. A brilliant cocktail of technique, violence and sportsmanship, this 15 minutes has it all.

Even as he fast approaches the age of 50, Antônio Rodrigo Nogueira still cuts a pretty imposing figure and it seems unlikely, even today, that someone—anyone—could knock him out. Flash back to 2008 and the notion sounded damn near impossible, particularly by the likes of Frank Mir, who recorded the first ever TKO of “Big Nog” at UFC 92.

This fight is a fascinating study in dualities: the calm, calculated, placid precision of Dooho Choi and the full-throttle fury of Jeremy Stephens.

When the fighters are evenly matched, fury rarely wins those matchups, but “Lil Heathen” was at the peak of his game and nothing was going to stop him on this freezing night in St. Louis. The finish still takes my breath away even now.

If I didn’t know better, you could probably convince me that Dom Cruz had somehow found a time machine, gone into the future and watched this fight, and then came back armed with the knowledge of how to win the bantamweight title.

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Maybe it’s because it was just the second fight of the early prelims, or perhaps because Conor vs Khabib was percolating just a few weeks in the future, but this fight is criminally overlooked in the pantheon of great bantamweight throwdowns.

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There’s a famous country song that intones “I’m not as good as once was, but I can be as good once as I ever was” and for me that perfectly encapsulates Wanderlei Silva knocking out Brian Stann at Saitama Super Arena.

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It might have served a fitting bookend for the 2024 UFC Hall Of Famer who scored both a performance bonus and a Fight of the Night bonus for his victory over Brian Stann, who was younger, faster and favored by most to win, coupled with fact it all happened in Japan, where “The Axe Murderer” first made audiences sit up and take notice during his days in PRIDE.

This bout is one I’m nominating for the “modern classics” wing of this very unofficial Desert Island Hall of Fame. When the bout was first announced, it caused a bit of confusion among fans: why were two relatively unknown debutants featured in the middle of the main card of a stacked SoCal fight night? Within mere moments of the opening bell, the question had been answered. 15 minutes later, the raucous, sweaty crowd at Pechanga Arena was on its feet and roaring. Dana White himself met each fighter as they exited the Octagon to express how impressed he was. Let that sink in for a second.

I’d wager my life savings on the notion that at least one, if not both, of the women involved will fight for the strawweight title one day (time is on their side, one of them is 25 and the other is 22), and we’ll look back at this fight as the incredible origin story of an incredible UFC career.

"I'm going to knock him out. He's going to be laying on the floor. He's going to look up at the stars and think 'S***, I just lost my belt to somebody that came in on two weeks’ notice.'"

They don’t call him “Mystic Mike,” but Bisping did predict these things in a fight that caps my list for its pure storytelling perfection. Not only do I watch this fight on the regular, but I sometimes indulge in the media and press conferences that surrounded UFC 199, just to relive the entire sequence like a Hollywood movie. The entire run-up, the fight and the epilogue are a complete chef's kiss.