Fast facts
- Division: Lightweight (No. 24 in Knockout Daily’s Cagefile rankings)
- Record: 24-15
- Nationality: New Zealand
- Team/gym: City Kickboxing, Auckland
- Notable wins: Hatsu Hioki, Ross Pearson, Jim Miller, Gilbert Burns, Al Iaquinta, Paul Felder, Jalin Turner, Mateusz Gamrot
On Oct. 26, the Championship Rounds account on X passed along a photo Dan Hooker had posted himself. It showed a cut on his lower lip from training, the kind of small, ugly souvenir every fighter brings home from a hard sparring week. Hooker had less than a month to go before he faces Brian Ortega in Doha, and he was coming off three straight losses. He posted it anyway. That fits a man who has spent his whole career letting people see the work.
Auckland, rugby, and a coaching job before a pro fight
Daniel Preston Hooker was born in Auckland on Feb. 13, 1990, into a family of partial Māori descent (Ngāti Maniapoto). He played both codes of rugby through school, and it was a friend who brought him to mixed martial arts after he left. The detail I keep returning to is the order of things. Hooker started coaching MMA in 2008. His professional debut came in March 2009. He was teaching the sport before anyone paid him to fight in it.
View post on X
He went on to serve as head coach at City Kickboxing, the Auckland gym still listed as his team, and in mid-2018 he opened his own place, Combat Academy in Ellerslie, with a full-sized boxing ring and an octagon under one roof. He later closed it to concentrate on his own career. In September 2021 he announced he was relocating to the United States, citing trouble with New Zealand’s lockdown measures and with getting a work visa to travel. He never really left. He still lives and trains in Auckland.
The regional years were busy in every direction. Hooker went 10-4 in MMA before the UFC, mostly at home, and won the AFC lightweight title (defending it twice) along with the Supremacy Fighting Championships New Zealand lightweight belt. He also built a 9-1-3 kickboxing record with the King in the Ring middleweight title and the WKBF X-Rules welterweight title, entered no-gi grappling tournaments where he won two matches by guillotine, and took a heavyweight fight weighing 189 pounds, knocking out Mark Creedy in Round 2. This was a young man who said yes to things.
The style
Hooker is a striker first, long and patient, with a kickboxer’s sense of range. The guillotine has always been his quiet second weapon, though. He beat Mark Eddiva in Round 1 with a high-elbow mounted guillotine in 2016 and choked out Marc Diakiese in Round 3 at UFC 219. On Oct. 25, 2025, he received his Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, which for a fighter remembered mostly for blood and exchanges is a nice correction to the record.
The fights that made him
His UFC debut was a Round 1 TKO of Ian Entwistle in June 2014, and his featherweight run after that was uneven, with decision losses to Maximo Blanco, Yair Rodríguez and Jason Knight. The breakthrough at 145 came in May 2015, when a head kick and punches put Hatsu Hioki away in Round 2. Nobody had knocked Hioki out before. UFC.com ranked it the No. 8 upset of the year.
The move to lightweight in 2017 is where Hooker became Hooker. He knocked out Ross Pearson in Round 2, submitted Diakiese, then stopped Jim Miller and Gilbert Burns, both in Round 1, within roughly 11 weeks of each other in 2018. Edson Barboza halted the streak with a TKO that December. Hooker answered with a Round 1 knockout of James Vick and a clear decision over Al Iaquinta.
Then came 2020, the year casual fans learned his name. He beat Paul Felder by split decision in February in a fight most of the press thought he lost (12 of 17 media members scored it for Felder, four for Hooker). Four months later he met Dustin Poirier and lost a unanimous decision in a bout widely considered one of the best of the year. ESPN named Round 2 its Round of the Year. That fight earned him nothing in the standings and everything in reputation.
2021 tested him harder. Michael Chandler stopped him in Round 1 at UFC 257, and Hooker set his gloves in the center of the octagon before reconsidering and deciding not to retire. He beat Nasrat Haqparast that September, then took Islam Makhachev on short notice as a replacement for Rafael dos Anjos and was submitted by kimura in Round 1. A featherweight return against Arnold Allen ended in a Round 1 TKO loss in March 2022.
What followed was the best stretch of his late career. He stopped Claudio Puelles in Round 2 at UFC 281. At UFC 290 he edged Jalin Turner by split decision after Turner missed weight at 158 pounds and forfeited 20% of his purse to Hooker; LowKick MMA called it the Comeback of the Year. At UFC 305 in August 2024 he took a split decision over Mateusz Gamrot, a Fight of the Night that eight of 17 media outlets scored for him, and ESPN named him its most improved fighter of 2024.
The hands kept failing him in between. A hand injury pulled him from UFC 285, another injury forced him out of a December 2023 date with Bobby Green, and a hand injury cost him a UFC 313 fight with Justin Gaethje in March 2025. Gaethje is now the undisputed lightweight champion after upsetting Ilia Topuria at UFC White House in June 2026, per MMA Fighting.
Where he stands
The last year has been brutal. Hooker headlined against Arman Tsarukyan on Nov. 22, 2025, four weeks after getting his black belt, and was submitted by arm-triangle in Round 2. MMA Fighting now lists Tsarukyan as the No. 1 contender at 155. Benoît Saint Denis stopped Hooker by TKO in Round 2 in the UFC 325 co-main in February. In September, in a main event at UFC Fight Night 287, promotional newcomer Salahdine Parnasse finished him in Round 1. That’s three losses in a row, all stoppages, and he sits at No. 24 in our lightweight rankings.
I won’t pretend that skid means nothing. It does. But a record of 24-15 built against Poirier, Makhachev, Chandler, Barboza, Tsarukyan and Saint Denis belongs to someone who never once asked for an easier night, and his daughter Zoe, who has appeared beside him in UFC Embedded vlogs, has grown up watching him take every one of those calls.
Hooker meets Brian Ortega on Nov. 21 at UFC Fight Night 294 at Ali Bin Hamad al-Attiyah Arena in Doha, on a card headlined by Jiri Prochazka and Navajo Stirling. The lip should be closed by then.
