UFC featherweight champion Max Holloway is still searching for answers.
Less than a month removed from being forced out of his title defense at UFC 226 due to ‘concussion like symptoms’, the 26-year old Hawaiian has undergone a battery of tests with doctors but doesn’t appear any closer to finding a diagnosis.
Earlier in July, Holloway was scheduled to face top ranked contender Brian Ortega but he was pulled from the card after two separate trips to the hospital left him on the outside looking in for the card.
Now Holloway has spent time with several physicians including UFC prescribed specialists and while he’s still going through testing, it doesn’t sound like any closer to getting a diagnosis.
“The update is I’ve seen multiple doctors and experts but they haven’t been able to give us any answers about what happened,” Holloway said when speaking to ESPN. “But there’s one thing they know right now, and that’s that I’m OK. I’m OK. I’m going to fight again, but that’s all we know. As of right now I’m good.”
Perhaps the most perplexing part about Holloway’s situation is the two obvious causes for his condition have seemingly been eliminated already.
“I’m going to fight again, but that’s all we know,” ~ Max Holloway
Holloway says doctors have assured him that his problems didn’t stem from weight cutting and he didn’t suffer a knockout or any serious damage during training camp that would lead him to believe it was a concussion.
While it’s good news that he’s been able to eliminate those potential causes, Holloway is still no closer to finding out what went wrong.
“This wasn’t a weight cut. I made weight 20-plus times and you guys have been there through the hard weight cuts to the easy ones, to the hard training camps. This wasn’t a weight cut thing. It was weird,” Holloway explained.
“There’s rumors going around that I got knocked out in training and I wish it was that so we could just write it down and be like, ‘look, this is what happened’ and we could move on from it. That didn’t happen. We had hard training days, but I didn’t suffered a concussion at all. I wish the answer was that simple. That’s why it’s so confusing. It would be easy to move forward if we knew what happened. Not just for me, for my mom, my family and my whole team. We’re struggling with it right now.”
Holloway added that he still hopes to fight again before the end of the year but obviously everybody around him is making sure that he’s 100-percent healthy before being allowed to step back into the Octagon.
