On four separate occasions between 2015 and 2019, Tony Ferguson was booked to fight the great Khabib Nurmagomedov in what would have been a deliriously intriguing battle. Each time it fell apart, the sighs got louder, and every time it was put back together, there was a spike in the stakes that made it feel that much bigger. They were two of the UFC’s absolute best lightweights going for many years, and they were intricately linked as rivals, even if they never traded a blow.
In the end, for reasons that only the smiting MMA gods atop Mount Monster Energy can understand, the matchup was simply cursed. A fight never happened. Though the UFC tried to give us a public blood frenzy featuring Ferguson’s sword-sharp hellbows and Khabib’s smeshing ground-and-pound, some crazy shit always happened to prevent it. When Ferguson tore a knee ligament in 2018 tripping over a camera cable after a media obligation to promote his showdown with Khabib on—of all days—April Fool’s Day, it felt like the sickest joke of all.
MMA died a little that day.
That’s why, on a big fight weekend like the one we’re about to have, it’s good to remember what’s left us wanting in combat sports. We never got Georges St-Pierre versus Anderson Silva, either, or Fedor Emelianenko against Brock Lesnar. And in the world of boxing, Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis were like two ships passing in the night in the 1990s. In that way, Saturday night’s unifying welterweight title fight between Errol Spence Jr. and Terence Crawford feels not only like a major happening for boxing, but like something altogether precious—especially for boxing, where getting the two best fighters in the same ring together is harder than the equation left on the board in Good Will Hunting. Two of the very best, on the backends of their primes, will face each other in Las Vegas to find out who is better. That’s really all you can ask for.
On the same night, in Salt Lake City at UFC 291, Justin Gaethje and Dustin Poirier will put on a sequel to their classic clash from five years ago. Much like Nurmagomedov and Ferguson, Gaethje and Poirier have remained in the top five in the UFC’s lightweight division for years, even if there is less than an ounce of self-preservation to be found between the two of them. Without the benefit of a title in play, the UFC has dusted off the BMF (ahem, Baddest Motherfucker) belt for the occasion.
Normally MMA and boxing, though spiritually akin, don’t really mix. Boxing stays on one side behind Michael Buffer and MMA on the other behind Bruce Buffer, and each pinches their noses at the other. But when you get a rare fight of the caliber of Spence versus Crawford (available to watch on PPV.com or on Showtime), and put it next to a UFC pay-per-view constructed of mayhem and violence, that makes for a very big evening in combat sports.
Perhaps even the biggest weekend of the year. Here’s a preview of everything that’s going down this weekend.
UFC 291: Dustin Poirier Vs. Justin Gaethje
When they first met in the octagon five years ago, it was a war of attrition. Poirier was a 20-fight UFC veteran while Gaethje, in only his third UFC fight, was a relative newbie. The only thing people really knew about him was that he was absolutely batshit wild. The kind of guy who would jump in front of a rumbling buffalo stampede just to feel something. The kind of guy who would walk through 100 punches just to land one. In other words, exactly what the UFC covets in a fighter.
Poirier tried to shut down Gaethje the way apocalypse survivors try to stop zombies: He aimed for the head. He hit the manic-bobbing Gaethje with high heat through the first round, while Gaethje attempted to chop down Poirier’s legs from below. Though Gaethje is ruthlessly aggressive, Poirier is quietly the most sadistic fighter in the UFC. His mission that night was to smother and pressure and ultimately siphon the will out of Gaethje. It made for a hell of a collision.
By the third round—after Poirier was wobbled and had his eye poked for a second time, leaving three Justin Gaethjes standing in front of him—a full demolition had already taken place. Poirier put a beating on Gaethje that would have stopped just about anybody else in the division, and Gaethje had not only weathered it but had actually begun to turn the tide. It was a master class in perseverance on Gaethje’s part, and realistically, that’s what he’s known for. Whenever Poirier tried to grab hold or shoot in, he couldn’t hold him down, as Gaethje was a writing pile of convulsions and frantic, unsettled energy.
Poirier ultimately prevailed in the fourth round, stopping Gaethje with a flurry. He got his hand raised but he limped out of the cage. That’s the thing about the thankless task of having to face Gaethje again. Gaethje may not win all of his fights, but he takes a piece out of you every time. If you go back and compare the before-and-after pictures of Rafael Fiziev in Gaethje’s last fight, it tells you everything you need to know about the trauma that comes with locking yourself in there with that kind of berserker.
The expectation for this sequel to deliver fireworks is high. Doubly so with the UFC putting the fictitious BMF title on the line, which obligates the fighters to go out on their shields. Not that either man has a problem with that in the first place.
Since they last met, Poirier has become a star, beating Conor McGregor twice, winning the interim 155-pound title against Max Holloway, and putting on barnburners against Eddie Alvarez, Dan Hooker, and Michael Chandler. He has title credentials, but in both of his actual title shots—first against Khabib, and later against Charles Oliveira—he came up short. At this point, even with the title fight between Oliveira and Islam Makhachev booked for October, Poirier is making a third push to get a shot at the strap.
And Gaethje? After he lost to Poirier in 2018 he knocked out four guys in a row before losing his own title bid against Khabib. Titles probably don’t mean all that much to a man who calls himself “The Highlight,” as blowing the roof off the joint seems to be his sole mission on Earth. This is going to be a banger, if for no other reason than both guys are spectacularly stubborn in their quest to win.
At Last, Boxing Gets Spence-Crawford
The last time the UFC had a BMF title on the line was on November 2, 2019, when Jorge Masvidal and Nate Diaz squared off at Madison Square Garden. That same evening, across the country in Las Vegas, Canelo Álvarez was moving up to face Sergey Kovalev for the WBO light heavyweight title. It was a night that rankled boxing fans to their core, as the great Canelo was forced to wait an hour in his dressing room for the Diaz-Masvidal fight to finish up before fight fans could shift their attention and he could make his walk.
Boxing’s literal best took a back seat to the UFC’s hypothetical baddest.
As luck would have it, the BMF title’s encore is happening on the same night as Spence-Crawford, and if there’s one thing that’s certain it’s this: Nobody is going to make three-belt superstar Errol Spence Jr. wait to fight. And Terence Crawford might be the best pound-for-pound boxer going. If anything, the UFC might pick up the pace a bit so that nothing overlaps.
Crawford isn’t an unsung hero in boxing, but he’s an undersung champion given all he’s accomplished. A perfect 39-0 with 30 knockouts, he defies story lines and conventions at every turn. Jeff Horn is too big for “Bud”? The WBO title fit nicely around Crawford’s waist that night. Crawford can’t carry a PPV? His fight with Viktor Postol proved otherwise. He’s not ready for a big-time name? In 2014, when he beat Yuriorkis Gamboa in his hometown of Omaha, the tune changed. Teddy Atlas has called Crawford the most instinctive fighter in the game, and when you couple that with an off-the-charts IQ, it makes for a deadly combination.
Spence can’t be considered truly great until he fights the other biggest name of his generation. He knows he needs the rivalry. In boxing, the zeroes on a fighter’s loss record are protected like $100 million diamonds. Yet we saw with the showdown between undefeated fighters Ryan Garcia and Gervonta Davis in April that there’s been a welcome sea change going on that front. The fact that fight fans have been pining to see Spence versus Crawford for five years and that they’re finally meeting as unbeaten fighters is somewhat remarkable.
There are a lot of fascinating plots and subplots to this fight. Crawford’s bid to win four belts in a weight class for the second time is historic. He unified the light welterweight titles in 2017 against Julius Indongo, before vacating to fight Horn the next summer. If he hasn’t received the love he’s deserved over the years, beating Spence would catch everyone up to where his legacy already is.
As for Spence, you get the sense that after rolling his Ferrari in his hometown of Dallas in a near-tragic accident back in 2019, he’s playing with spiritual house money. The fact that he walked away with negligible injuries was not just remarkable but lucky, and he looked like the best version of himself in his last fight. Even though a retinal tear in his eye kept him from facing Manny Pacquaio in 2021 in what would’ve been the biggest fight of his career, Spence has emerged as one of boxing’s most electrifying must-see fighters.
There’s something beautiful about big fights in boxing. The pageantry. The factions. The buzz in the air. All of it feels magnified, especially in Las Vegas. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose. To paraphrase Howard Cosell, when you get a fight this good, “Boxing becomes drama on the grandest scale.”
Alex Pereira Moves Up to Face Jan Blachowicz
It wasn’t all that long ago when Alex Pereira was the UFC’s middleweight champion. But what people really saw him as was a boogeyman seemingly put on this planet to haunt Israel Adesanya, as he’d beaten him twice in the kickboxing ring before taking Izzy’s 185-pound UFC belt in 2022.
Ultimately Pereira gave the belt back in the rematch at UFC 287, as he got knocked out by Adesanya. Plenty of people wondered whether Pereira would stick around at middleweight and try to get the obvious rubber match with Izzy, but with his massive 6-foot-4 frame and outsized punching power, a move up to light heavyweight was always a tempting move.
Now here he is, moving up to face the former light heavyweight champion Jan Blachowicz in the co–main event of UFC 291. Blachowicz could rightly be called the “Middleweight Slayer,” as he has rudely welcomed plenty of bulked-up fighters to the new weight division, knocking out Luke Rockhold and decisioning both Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza and Adesanya. The difference here is that Pereira is more in the cut of a traditional 205-pounder. He’s huge. And he packs a bigger wallop than any of the aforementioned brutes.
The probability of a knockout here is high. Even at 40 years old, the Polish power broker Blachowicz throws everything with super bad intentions, and if he connects, it’s over. At the same time, Pereira isn’t exactly out there to play hop-scotch either. As an explosive kickboxer, he can snipe a slower fighter at range and has shown that if he connects flush, most don’t come back.
If there’s some ambiguity to this bout besides the obvious unknowns of how Pereira will look in his new weight class, it’s what’s at stake. The light heavyweight champion Jamahal Hill recently ruptured his Achilles and vacated his title, seemingly making this fight an obvious choice for the vacant title. Maybe it was because all the promo packages had already been cut and all the tickets sold, but the UFC didn’t feel compelled to upgrade it to that status.
What is sure is that the winner of this fight will almost certainly be fighting for the light heavyweight title next. With Jiri Prochazka nearly ready to come back, and Aleksandar Rakic and Magomed Ankalaev hanging around out there, plenty of options are available for the UFC. For the truly imaginative, there’s also another possibility in play: If Pereira wins on Saturday, and Izzy successfully defends his title in October against Sean Strickland (if Strickland takes the fight), perhaps Adesanya goes up to challenge Pereira for the vacant light heavyweight crown? Of all the ways things could go, that one is the most tantalizing.
Best of the Rest on Saturday
UFC 291 is a very good card, but these aren’t spring chickens. In fact, the average age of the 10 main-card fighters is 35 years old. Only one fighter on the PPV main is under 30 years old, and that’s the other Pereira—Michel Pereira (no relation), the esoteric, somersaulting, front-flipping madman who is taking on the 40-year-old Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson.
Thompson has been a measured contender for a long, long time, a smart fighter who picks his moments (and occasionally blows somebody up, like he did Johny Hendricks). And Pereira has been winning since he cut back on the antics, which runs counterintuitive to entertainment but plays well for longevity. What happens when Thompson’s urge to indulge more with his striking meets Pereira’s conscious reluctance to throw incautiously? I’m not sure, but you get the feeling this will be a weird one.
Also on the card, it’s the man who we started with—the 39-year-old Tony Ferguson. If the writing is on the wall for Ferguson, it began popping like bright neon graffiti when Michael Chandler kicked his jawbone into the stands at UFC 274. Overall, Ferguson has lost five straight fights, though he did show flashes of his old self against Nate Diaz his last time out. A loss to Bobby Green would all but signal the end for Ferguson, who doesn’t necessarily see it that way. He swore this week in the media that he’s not done by a long shot.
In fact, what Ferguson said he’d like to do is win five straight and then capture the lightweight title. Delusional? Let’s just say that if he pulls that off, the Baddest Motherfucker title will only temporarily fall into the hands of either Gaethje or Poirier, before it lives forever with “El Cucuy.”
Chuck Mindenhall writes about combat sports without bias, and sometimes about his Denver teams with extreme bias. He cohosts The Ringer MMA Show on Spotify.