“I see that stuff, and I respect that,” he said. “That’s what some people like to say. That’s what most people say. But the difference is I’ve been hungry. The last fight, I trained over Zoom. How much hungrier can someone get? We couldn’t train in person. I had to train over Zoom. We figured it out, and I’ve been hungry. I can’t wait to go out there Saturday night and not necessarily remind people or show people; I just want to go out there and do my thing.”
In terms of training for Kattar, Holloway continued his trend borne from necessity in his last fight and stayed away from hard sparring for this camp. Holloway felt sharp and healthy going into the last fight, so he felt no reason to mess with it. Though he is just 29 years old, Holloway has plenty of miles and brawls on his proverbial odometer, so avoiding as much damage as possible is crucial as his career enters another chapter.
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“We don’t really do full-contact,” he said. “We move here and there, but very rarely. But you still gotta go through the movements. We go through the movements, we go through the moves with everything on the ground, striking. We’re just not sparring hard. We’re just not trying to kill each other, knock each other’s head off. I just feel more sharp.”
The sharpness manifested in a pair of knockdowns in the opening rounds of the rematch with Volkanovski, so it’s fair to expect the same old “Blessed” come January 16.
