5 strikers in the UFC who went onto become excellent grapplers
To succeed in the UFC these days, a fighter needs to have supreme skills in all areas. Sure, specialists can still have plenty of success, but if they’re lacking skills in a single area they’re always likely to struggle.
Over the years we’ve seen plenty of grapplers develop excellent striking skills in the UFC, but we’ve also seen a number of high-end strikers suddenly become renowned for their grappling too.
Is it trickier for a striker to master the art of grappling than it is for a grappler to master the art of striking? It’s almost impossible to say, as anyone learning new skills after developing a different skill-set from their younger days is going to find it difficult.
However, plenty of fighters have pulled it off – and gone onto see major success in the UFC.
So with this considered, here are five strikers in the UFC who went onto become excellent grapplers.
#5. Max Holloway – former UFC featherweight champion
When Max Holloway made his UFC debut in 2012 as a late replacement in a fight with Dustin Poirier. He did so as one of the youngest and most inexperienced fighters in UFC history.
‘Blessed’ was just 20 years old at the time and had only four professional fights to his name. However, he had garnered plenty of hype thanks to his kickboxing skills, as he’d been striking since his school days and had apparently won his first amateur bout at the age of 15.
Holloway was duly dominated by Poirier on the ground and looked far out of his depth when it came to grappling. The Hawaiian then used his striking to reel off three straight wins, but came unstuck on the ground again against Dennis Bermudez and Conor McGregor.
However, after taking a few months off following the McGregor loss, Holloway returned – and had clearly been working on his ground game a lot.
He choked out the talented Andre Fili with a guillotine choke at UFC 172 in April 2014. A year later, he displayed phenomenal grappling skills to submit a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt in Cub Swanson with the same choke.
And while ‘Blessed’ has not won a fight via submission since, he has used takedowns and his grappling skills to dominate other opponents. He is clearly a fully-rounded fighter capable of scrambling with the best on the mat.
Essentially, he couldn’t be much further from the one-dimensional kickboxer that he was when he debuted in the UFC nearly a decade ago.