Manel Kape didn’t wait until January 30 to take Joshua Van’s flyweight title. He took it at the press conference.
The UFC brought all eight headliners from UFC 335 and UFC 336 to the Infosys Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York for a joint kickoff presser and face-offs. Van’s seat sat empty because the champion was still in transit, reportedly held up by travel problems. Kape noticed. He walked over to Van’s podium, picked up the flyweight belt resting on the table, draped it over his shoulder and started treating it like his own property.
Then he turned to the boss. “Dana, what the f**k! You forget the address for the school bus? Where is my son? I don’t see my son here,” Kape said, in a clip the UFC on Paramount+ account posted on X.
Van did eventually show up, though not until after Dana White had already wrapped the face-offs. When he got there, he took his belt back from Kape. Van explained the delay on Instagram, writing, “Thx God we gon Make it to press conference. After we miss a couple of flights.”
How We Got Here
The two flyweights have been feuding for months, so the belt grab landed on fertile ground. Van, the Burmese champion, came into the title picture after Alexandre Pantoja’s injury last December and has since locked it down with two successful defenses. He beat Tatsuro Taira at UFC 328, then beat Pantoja in their rematch at UFC 331 this past September. That run earned him a first 2027 assignment against Kape, the Portuguese contender who arrives on a four-fight finishing streak.
Van vs. Kape headlines UFC 336, which opens the UFC’s 2027 calendar in Toronto on January 30. It’s the promotion’s first numbered event in the city. Carlos Prates and Michael Morales fight for interim welterweight gold on the same card.
The other half of the presser belonged to UFC 335, set for T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on December 12. Charles Oliveira meets Diego Lopes for the BMF title there, and Alex Pereira makes his second heavyweight appearance against Sergei Pavlovich.
Tommy’s Take
I love this, and I love it because nobody staged it. The UFC can’t script a champion missing a couple of flights, and Kape didn’t need a writers’ room to turn an empty chair into a bit. He saw a belt sitting unattended on a table in New York and grabbed it, which is about as clean a statement of intent as a challenger can make. The “school bus” line is mean in the funny way, the way you rag on your buddy, and it gives Van something real to be annoyed about for the next 11 weeks. Van also handled it right. He showed up, took his belt back and didn’t make a speech about it. The guy with two defenses gets to be the calm one, and the guy with four straight finishes gets to be the loud one. Kape has held the belt exactly once so far, on a borrowed shoulder in a theater. In Toronto on January 30, he finds out if he can keep it.
