LAS VEGAS — There’s nothing like a Justin Gaethje fight. It doesn’t matter who the opponent is. Doesn’t matter when, where, or what promotion they’re fighting for. You’re getting an old school brawl — the kind of blood-and-guts, throwback fight you don’t see anymore.
That’s the fight a profoundly resilient Paddy Pimblett got at UFC 324, as Gaethje brought the ferocity he promised all week and overwhelmed the rising English star over five rounds, walking away with an interim lightweight strap in the process. The scorecards read 49-46, 49-46, 48-47. But that’s a woefully inadequate way of reflecting the war of attrition Gaethje and Pimblett spent 25 minutes waging.
“The strategy was to put my head in his chest and push him backwards. If you watch every champion, they move forward,” Gaethje said in the octagon after the fight, hands resting on the gold belt around his waist. “But I went away from the game plan by trying to kill him. Per usual.”
As if it was ever going to play out another way. And yet, Saturday wasn’t only a quintessential Gaethje performance, the 37-year-old reaching deep into the well again and again, treating each of the five rounds like its own isolated fight he needed to do everything possible to win. It was, for fans of a certain vintage, like rewinding time by a decade.
Among the last of a dying lightweight breed that established 155 pounds as the UFC’s premier division throughout the 2010’s — think Dustin Poirier, Eddie Alvarez, Rafael dos Anjos, Charles Oliveira, Khabib Nurmagomedov — Gaethje was representing an era as much as himself against the young firebrand Pimblett. He was carrying the flag for a generation of fighters they don’t make anymore.
Dogged, uncompromising, relentless strikers who cared less about the circumstances leading into a fight — short notice, opponent missed weight, fighting down the rankings, manufactured social media beef, whatever — than digging deeper than their opponent would dare during it. Fearless, self-sacrificing, take-one-to-give-one grinders. Paid in full, as Poirier would say.
That’s how Gaethje ended up with a 15th fight night bonus — tying Poirier, Joe Lauzon, and Jim Miller for fourth-most all-time — in his 15th UFC fight Saturday. And end-of-the-night shoutouts on X from two of his fellow warhorses from fights gone by.
“It feels great. I wish you guys could all feel what I felt tonight. The adrenaline, the pressure,” Gaethje said. “It makes me a better person, understanding and going through that and facing my fears.”
They didn’t exactly ease into it, Gaethje and Pimblett, as each came out taking home run swings and landing heavily in either direction. Pimblett had success with leg kicks and uppercuts; Gaethje maintained forward pressure, landing power punches along the fence. Through two rounds, Gaethje was breathing heavily while Pimblett walked back to his corner as blood streamed from his right eye and left nostril.
The third round was Pimblett’s best, as headhunting with reckless abandon caught up to Gaethje and his pace slowed. Without his opponent constantly forcing him backwards, Pimblett finally had time and space to operate, getting home with repeated digs to the body when he wasn’t trying to kick Gaethje’s legs out from under him.
“I just had to stay in it,” Gaethje said. “I’ve been there. I’ve done it too many times to try to think that it’s over or he’s quitting. I could feel that this guy was trying to hurt me the whole time. And if I took my foot off the pedal for a second, he was on my ass.”
And yet, the championship rounds were mostly a test of how much punishment Gaethje could deliver and how much durability Pimblett could show. If there was ever a clean path to victory for Pimblett in this fight, it was going to be on the mat. But he never found a way to initiate grappling, as Gaethje defended takedowns effectively by sprawling, sinking headlocks, and cradling, driving his weight through Pimblett’s shoulders to keep him contained.
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What Pimblett found himself in was a series of car crashes as Gaethje worked his way inside repeatedly, winging heavy shots and dirty boxing within clinches. That’s the kind of fight Gaethje wants. And considering his tendency to exit confrontations with chin held high on the centre line, leaving him vulnerable to tight hooks from either direction, one Pimblett’s not going to leave unscathed.
“I really wanted to finish him. But I love teaching him a lesson. He said my face was not going to look the same after the fight, and his would look the exact same,” Gaethje said. “So, as soon as it was over, I was like, ‘Well, look at your face, motherf—er. It does not look the same.’”
Still only 31 years old, Pimblett has plenty of runway remaining to work his way back to a title shot. But at Gaethje’s age, this fight meant everything. A loss might have been it for a storied career. But the win suddenly has him on the precipice of undisputed lightweight gold that’s eluded him his entire career.
Of course, the biggest variable going forward is Ilia Topuria, who’s entangled in a legal dispute with his estranged wife, Georgina, over custody of their child. There’s no telling whether the lightweight champion’s hiatus will last only a couple of months or the better part of the year. All we can say with certainty is that, with Gaethje’s win on Saturday, Topuria’s title has become disputed. And if he isn’t available to unify the belts anytime soon, the UFC will be forced into an uncomfortable decision.
These would be the options, from cleanest to murkiest. Stripping Topuria and elevating Gaethje to undisputed champion. Asking Gaethje to defend his interim belt while Topuria remains sidelined with the definitive one. Or putting lightweight’s title picture on pause and awaiting Topuria’s return.
Now, for all we know, Topuria’s issues could resolve in short order, producing UFC’s best-case scenario of avoiding the awkwardness altogether and booking him to headline a card against Gaethje sometime in the second quarter of 2026 — perhaps even at the White House in June. That’s optimistic, sure. But not inconceivable.
And you know who needs to remain optimistic about all this? The most meritocratically deserving lightweight contender of them all — Arman Tsarukyan. There are only so many grappling tournaments and Gen Z streamers for him to keep busy with when not creating preposterous food consumption content for social media. He’s too talented to waste this much of his athletic prime on the title picture periphery. Eventually, the madness must end.
Of course, that would necessitate the UFC committing to placing him in a premier promotional position after he withdrew from his last title shot at the 11th hour before nearly submarining his next fight with a weigh-in headbutt. Understandably, UFC brass isn’t keen to reward that unpredictability. But once matters are settled between Topuria and Gaethje, withholding Tsarukyan’s earned opportunity will be much less justifiable.
So, here Gaethje is, with at least one and potentially several high-profile fights ahead of him as he keeps his truculent lightweight generation’s window ajar for just a bit longer. One more for the Poirier’s, the Nurmagomedov’s, the Alvarez’s.
Gaethje waged wars with all of the above and then some back when it seemed like every dude he fought was older than him. He remembers being in Pimblett’s shoes in 2017 when a 34-year-old Alvarez gave a 29-year-old Gaethje an invaluable seminar — via a third-round knockout at UFC 218 — about mindset and the need to reckon with the worst possible outcome to alleviate big-fight pressure.
It’s wisdom like that, learned from those fellow legends, Gaethje’s now paying forward to the next generation of lightweights — the young guys like Pimblett who could carry the flag for him, and a brand of uncompromising fighters they don’t make anymore, someday.
“You have to learn these lessons. His mindset going into that fight was not good. You cannot do that like this. False confidence is terrible, terrible. It’ll kill you every time,” Gaethje says. “I knew I was going to have to steal some momentum and his confidence. I had to take that early. And the moment I stepped in there, he didn’t take his eyes off me. That was me not too long ago. And I guess I was Eddie Alvarez, here to teach him a lesson. Same thing [Alvarez] did to me.”
