Charles Oliveira will lean right into a fire-fight if Max Holloway hits his now infamous point down inside the confines of the cage when they compete. At UFC 326, the two will run it back for a rematch with Oliveira aiming to capture Holloway’s BMF title in the headline attraction of the numbered event. On March 7th, ‘do Bronx’ aims to even up the series with Holloway after Oliveira lost the first fight against ‘Blessed’ after sustaining an injury during a UFC Fight Night card in Western Canada.
The Holloway point down has become a signature gesture to call on opponents for a throwdown, with top names like Justin Gaethje ending up on the wrong end of a highlight reel after indulging in the former UFC featherweight champion’s request.
Addressing that immediate call to action and how the former UFC lightweight champion would respond to that sort of a happening [via a translation from RMC Sport Combat, with an excerpt posted to X account @ChampRDS], Oliveira said,
“If he calls me at the beginning of the round, in the middle of the round, it doesn’t matter, I’ll be there. Like I just said, that’s why I break people mentally. I don’t run from a fight, I seek it out. I’m hunting the whole time. It makes no difference to me.”
Charles Oliveira’s injury and how there is still uncertainty of how it transpired in the first Max Holloway fight
Charles Oliveira and his surrounding team still have no clue how he suffered an injury-related defeat to Max Holloway, even a decade on from being locked in the cage with the Hawaiian standout. The phrasing ‘nobody knows what actually happened’ was used in reference to the bout by Oliveira’s then-friend and present-day head coach, Diego Lima.
The fight came to a halt less than two minutes into the bout, with later reports stating that Oliveira sustained an esophagus tear during the 99-second bout that saw relatively minimal action take place due to the UFC Saskatoon bout’s brevity. Lima mentioned that Oliveira was kept for an additional monitoring period and was not given the green light to go back to Brazil from Canada right away. But that monitoring period seemed to yield little in terms of specifics related to how the ‘crazy’ and ‘very strange’ injury took place, to use Lima’s operative wording.