Throughout his long reign as the featherweight champion, Alexander Volkanovski proved himself to be one of the most well-rounded fighters that we have ever seen in the UFC. His striking has always been his strongest attribute, as seen in his three wins over a fellow all-time great in Max Holloway.
His grappling has also been incredibly effective whether it was offensively against the likes of Brian Ortega and Yair Rodriguez or defensively like in his first meeting with Islam Makhachev at UFC 284. However, in a recent Q&A video on his YouTube channel, “The Great” was asked an interesting question.
When debating what attribute he would take from another fighter to improve his own game, Volkanovski looked outside the box because he is already totally confident in his skills as a mixed martial artist and his athletic ability.
“I was going to say just pick a young fighter and be 18 again.”
Volkanovski ended up going with one key factor in combat sports that can’t be significantly improved no matter how much training you put in. In his fourth pro fight, the former champion suffered the first loss of his career as he was stopped by Corey Nelson back in 2013 at Australian FC 5.
He would then go another 24 fights before he would be finished by another opponent. Now, with three knockout losses on his record, Volkanovski has been stopped in back-to-back fights following his defeats to Islam Makhachev and Ilia Topuria.
The 36-year old seemingly took this into consideration when giving his answer, under the belief that this additional attribute would make it so much harder to opponents to come out on top against him.
“I mean who’s got, I mean Max had the chin and I still think like that would still be a crazy chin. But I’d say yeah, chin, cuz that’s how I’ve always looked at it. This is how it’s always been for me going through my career. You always know that someone can catch you, that’s just the game. I’ve always said it’s going to be hard for somebody to actually beat me. I mean Islam had that very close fight, that first one. So there’s only very, very few, if any, that can take me to a decision and beat me that way. Obviously you could say Islam did, it was a very close fight but I’ve always said that anyone can catch you, right… If you could sit there and have the chin where you take away that only opportunity for someone to beat ya, you’re going to be pretty hard to beat, that’s for sure.”
