Josh Hokit has been the talk of the MMA world and, in large part, due to his bizarre comments regarding former first lady Michelle Obama, his name has escaped the MMA sphere as well. Unfortunately for the UFC and the sport of MMA at large, it is not the good kind of attention, which it rarely is when MMA is getting talked about alongside mainstream sports or the greater news cycle in general. You don't need me to sit here and tell you that what he said was stupid and unnecessary. It takes little more than a few functioning braincells to figure that out. I think a more fruitful conversation to have is how should the UFC go about this because I don't know that there typical response is going to cut it anymore given the circumstances surrounding this situation.
Now, before we go any further, believe me when I say that I know exactly what is going to happen. If you've been following the UFC for any length of time, we know how this goes. Dana probably won't even be asked about it for awhile because the people he permits at the press conferences are as much of a journalist as I am most of the time and the ones who actually have legitimate qualifications are afraid to ask anything worthwhile because they will be banished like the others before them. When he eventually does talk about it, he'll give the same generic "freedom of speech" response he gives every time something like this happens. He'll act offended that someone would even waste his time with such a question, tell them they'll have to ask Hokit himself, and act like it is a situation that is completely out of his hands and that there is nothing he could ever do about it. While this is very dumb for a number of reasons, I think a lot of media members and MMA fans alike just don't even bother getting up in arms about it anymore because we've just seen it so many times that it isn't even surprising anymore. That probably isn't the right way to respond, but I think most of us who don't agree with those particular world views just don't really have the capacity to care as much as we used to.
With that said, I really don't think this situation is the same as so many others we have seen before. We've seen Chael Sonnen in hot water over some things, but that was largely in a different time and the world and the landscape of social media was all very different then. MMA was even less mainstream then, so it just didn't have the reach it does now and the concept of things going viral was just very different. More recently, the likes of Colby Covington and Sean Strickland have taken their shot at trying to say wild and crazy things in order to bring attention to themselves that they couldn't otherwise get. Appealing to the side of society and MMA fanbase who will embrace people who say those kinds of things is kind of the low hanging fruit for a lot of fighters who are stuck in neutral. They need that extra push and the easiest way to do it is to appeal to the heavily right wing side of the fanbase because they are the most likely to blindly support someone who expresses those types of views and whether you agree with it or not, it did somewhat work out for them, at least in the short term. They used that backing and it elevated their online support and got them into conversations they struggled to get in prior. I think the long term impact of that remains to be seen because they have pigeon holed themselves into that gimmick permanently, but I don't think any of them have the foresight for that or ultimately care all that much even if they did.
The reason that people will give you as to why the fighter will do this is because they are selling the fight and playing a gimmick to get people to tune in. Outside of Conor McGregor, I just don't really believe that this actually holds any water. They'll say that it attracts the people who think it's funny and they'll tune in to support and it will piss off the people who it offends and they'll tune in to watch them lose and I just don't really see any of that. Never once in my life have I had someone who doesn't watch fighting come and ask me about something that someone said in a press conference and then said they wanted to watch the fight because of that thing. I can believe that it draws more attention to your fight on the card than it would have otherwise received, but I would be surprised if it actually got more people watching the event as a whole a vast majority of the time.
I think the major issue for a lot of people, outside of the very obvious offensive nature of the comments, is that it is very clearly a manufactured character that is not even true to the persons real personality. Every time they get up and say something stupid, it is clearly rehearsed and written before hand and they just get up and recite it in a very awkward manor akin to someone in their high school public speaking class. It's not funny, it's not witty, and it isn't really interesting to watch in any way. The only people who think so are people who wear bandanas and sunglasses indoors. I think it grows old very quickly because not only is the gimmick itself stupid, but it isn't even being done in a good or interesting way. The only way I can describe it is like watching the John Bender want-to-be in your high school curse out the teacher because he thinks being edgy automatically makes him cool while the other kids just kind of look around with puzzled looks on their faces. I've considered the possibility that I am just in too deep and too much of a fan where things like this just don't really work or matter to me, but I really don't think that is the case. I would, genuinely, like someone who finds these types of guys funny to explain to me what is so funny and entertaining about them because I really want to understand. Is it purely the fact that you imagine people getting offended over it that you find entertaining? I genuinely don't get it and would love for one of their fans to try their best to explain what it is that they enjoy. I'm not being sarcastic in any way and really want to hear that perspective because clearly there's accounts of people online who love it and I want to know what I'm missing.
I can already hear people claiming that I'm being disingenuous because Covington vs Usman and Strickland vs Chimaev were a big deal and if they hadn't built their characters then no one would have been as interested in that fight. What I will agree with is that those fights had a certain heat and intensity that we don't see super often in modern MMA. Where I think they turn a blind eye is that the heat on those fights really isn't related to the character that Colby and Sean portray in the media. The fights had heat because they didn't like each other as people. Kamaru Usman didn't want to beat Colby more because he dressed like George Washington at the press conference and posted pictures with Donald Trump. Chimaev didn't want to fight better against Sean Strickland because he talked about gun rights and said that women belong in the kitchen. The fight had heat because they didn't like each other personally. I don't really know why people pretend otherwise. It is pretty clear to me, but again, I am open to being wrong.
At least when it comes to Colby and to Strickland a lesser degree, it felt like their careers were stalling out because they were otherwise boring. Colby had his back against the wall and was at risk of being cut from the UFC entirely if the story is true. Strickland was kind of stuck in middleweight purgatory. They wanted people to say anything about them because, in their opinion, anything was better than nothing at all. You may think I'm contradicting myself because I said earlier that I don't believe that anyone is watching a fight because of things people say, but now I'm saying that I understand that they did it to save their job. I believe there is a nuanced difference in that I don't believe more people watched their fight because of it. I just think it made the same people who already would have watched the fight talk about them for a news cycle. I think there are any number of gimmicks that they could have gone for that would have done the same without the need for racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive comments. A prime example is another guy I just mentioned, Khamzat Chimaev. They could have just done the Khamzat gimmick and said how they want to smash and crush and kill everyone in the division and acted wild and crazy that way. It seems to be working well for him.
What makes this situation so much different in my opinion is that I don't think Hokit needed to do any of this. The heavyweight division in 2026 is very different than welterweight and middleweight in the respective eras of Colby and Strickland. As things currently stand, there's like a handful of legitimate contenders at heavyweight, with all due respect. A guy who is as well rounded and a high action fighter like Hokit really sells itself. In a division starved for something interesting, a guy who is just going to come out and fight would have been more than enough. He could have even just stuck with his giving people the middle finger thing and ran with that. I don't know about you, but that sounds awfully similar to a certain set of brothers with the last name of Diaz to me and those guys are basically universally loved by everybody. It is just so wild to me that a guy with his style felt he needed anything more than that. He was set up to be a heavyweight version of Justin Gaethje who just came to scrap. Think back a few years ago to how people loved Tai Tuivasa. That is what Hokit had right in front of him because who wouldn't want to watch a guy like that fight and Hokit is obviously better than Tai. Instead, he chose to do all of this nonsense and while maybe it pushed him up the divison a fight or 2 faster, I don't think it really changed all that much. He ultimately had to have the skills to win these fights and he does. I feel like this ultimately lost him fans in the long run. Ok, he got to skip over fighting Sergei Spivac and jumped right to Curtis Blaydes because anonymous accounts online spam replies to twitter videos of his weird statements, but had he not done that, I think almost everyone would be a fan of his because he's just a fun fighter to watch when he's actually fighting.
The other way that I think this may be slightly different is that, whether intentional or just by circumstance, it seems like the UFC may have made a business decision with him. He was at the press conference that happened right before the fight, but there was a different press conference earlier on that he wasn't at. The entire card was there except for Hokit and Lewis and I find it hard to believe that was on accident. On one hand, I think we all know the reason why. On the other, I really don't know why. Logic tells you that they were afraid of him saying something too crazy when the UFC new they had more eyes than just the standard MMA community on them. However, when has Dana White literally ever cared about something like that. If anything, it seems like he likes it and finds it funny. Wasn't that the whole reason they gave Hokit the quick turnaround to have him be the person to fight Lewis? As the story goes, Trump requested Lewis be on the card with no mention of Hokit. There is any number of random heavyweights that they could have thrown on this card to let Derrick Lewis fight and have someone get finished. The reason they chose Hokit is because he had some juice behind him after his fight of the year candidate slugfest with Blaydes. The fact of the matter is that they wanted Hokit for that spot specifically and if you listen to the way they talk, they believe that a lot of his popularity and the reason people want to watch him is because of the things he says, whether I believe that to be true or not. So if you want him on the card so bad and if the way he speaks draws so many more viewers, then why was he not at the press conference? The only reason has to be that they were afraid of what would happen and what kind of pushback they would get. They didn't care as much about what he said a couple days before or after his fight because nothing is going to happen at that point.
In my opinion, now the UFC is kind of stuck. They pushed Hokit and put out all of this media behind him and seemingly encourage this type of behavior. They certainly don't discourage it. In his mind, he did all of this stuff and got exactly what he wanted out of it. There's no reason to hold back now and if anything, it's only going to get worse. It would be really hard to reel him in now because it is just too far gone. Hokit is sitting there on the cusp of a title shot and now the UFC is just going to be forced to deal with it. They made their bed with Strickland and now potentially Hokit and they're going to have to lie in it. What he will do or say next is anyone's guess, but I can't imagine the UFC brass is particularly happy about it. They just put on this once in a lifetime event that I don't think anyone could have ever dreamed of. If you're old enough then you can remember how MMA was looked at not all that long ago and now they're putting on massive events on the White House lawn. There were so many things potentially getting in the way of that including the weather and they somehow managed to navigate it all and put on an event that could not have gone better realistically. After all that work, all the money, and 7 fights that all absolutely delivered in terms of entertainment value both with the walkouts and the in cage action, and the main thing people outside of the MMA sphere are talking about is the weird guy with the bandana that had to call Michelle Obama a man. For that to be the lasting image and talking point surrounding this event has to be so disappointing for so many people involved, but at the end of the day, the UFC and Dana White in particular have nobody to blame but themselves. At best, they allow that kind of behavior and at worst, they sort of encourage it. Now it is up to them to live with that reality.
The UFC will have to navigate this now and I don't think anyone suspects they'll move any differently than they always have. They will just pretend this doesn't exist and just move on to the next event that Dana won't even be at. He won't be heard of until the next numbered event where everyone will be asking about Conor and Max, so it will be long out of the news cycle by the time he speaks next.
What do you guys think? Do you like Hokit? Are you entertained by his gimmick? Do you think the UFC will do anything? What would you do? Leave any and all thoughts and comments below. Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day.
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