Josh Hokit hasn’t won a UFC belt yet, and he’s already mapping out a route to three of them. The heavyweight contender told Jorge Masvidal on Death Row MMA that dropping two divisions to middleweight is on the table.
Hokit said he walks around at 235 pounds, which makes light heavyweight the obvious first stop. “I mean, it [light heavyweight] would be easy,” he said. Then he went further than anyone expected. “I could probably make middleweight, honestly,” Hokit told Masvidal, adding that watching some very large men cut down to 185 convinced him he could pull it off too.
He did leave himself an out. If he ever gets to double-champ status, Hokit admitted, a run at middleweight might come down to “too much ego getting involved,” though he made clear he’d take it if the opportunity showed up.
The 225-pound pitch
Hokit also floated a less painful option. Instead of carving 50 pounds off a 6-foot-1 frame, he wants the UFC to build a new weight class where the bigger guys meet in the middle, with the BMF belt attached.
“Honestly, I want to make my own division. Maybe like a 225, big guy BMF. True BMF,” he said. In his version, middleweights who like playing weight bully would come up to 205 and fight him there. He named Sean Strickland, Dricus du Plessis and Khamzat Chimaev as candidates.
Don’t hold your breath. The UFC hasn’t added a division in a long time, and the promotion has never been thrilled with champions bouncing between weight classes while belts sit idle. A one-off superfight with one of those names is the only realistic version of this.
The actual fight in front of him
All of this is hypothetical until Nov. 14, when Hokit challenges Ciryl Gane for the heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden. Alex Pereira has been a target of his for a long time, and he recently dropped a diss track aimed at Gane, Tom Aspinall and Jon Jones, so nobody can accuse the guy of being shy.
The three-division idea has a timely angle. A potential middleweight move for Islam Makhachev could set him up to try to become the first three-division champion in UFC history, so Hokit isn’t the only one thinking about it. He’d just be doing it in the opposite direction, going down instead of up.
There’s a stylistic catch. Hokit is small for a heavyweight, and he has climbed the rankings by using speed, wrestling and cardio to drown bigger men in pace, which has earned him Cain Velasquez comparisons. Drop to 205 or 185 and those edges shrink. He’d be the powerful guy chasing quicker opponents, and the conditioning advantage that breaks heavyweights becomes a lot less special.
My take: I love a heavyweight who answers a question straight, and Hokit gave Masvidal real answers instead of the usual one-fight-at-a-time mush. But a 235-pounder talking about 185 before he’s fought for gold is hotel bar talk. Gane doesn’t care about the 225 BMF division. Beat him at the Garden on Nov. 14, and then the phone calls about Khamzat start sounding a lot less ridiculous.
