Josh Hokit turned up to Thursday's UFC 334 press conference dressed for the fouls he says Ciryl Gane commits — gloves, a protective cup, a towel behind his head, an eye patch and protective goggles — and then spent the night shouting at a champion who mostly sat in silence.
“What kind of champion are you? What kind of man are you?”
The outfit was the message. Hokit arrived at Madison Square Garden wearing every piece of protection a fighter could want against an opponent with Gane's history, and the undefeated challenger made sure everyone in the room knew what each piece meant. The eye patch and the goggles pointed straight at the eye poke that ended Gane's fight with Tom Aspinall at UFC 321 in a no contest — the bout that still defines Gane's reign, even as he prepares for his first title defense.
Aspinall never fought again after that night. The British heavyweight later vacated the title while dealing with complications from the injury, and the eye surgeries that followed only deepened the story Hokit was telling with his costume. Gane addressed the eye-poke criticism earlier in the week, but the official result — a no contest rather than a win or a loss — follows him into every promotional appearance, and Hokit wore it on his face.
He did not stop at the visual gag. Hokit spent much of the press conference shouting across the stage at Gane, who sat largely silent and shook his head at several points while the challenger dominated the microphone. When the two were brought face to face for the traditional faceoff, Hokit pulled the goggles off for a closer look at the heavyweight champion.
Then he turned the crowd into his chorus. Hokit got the entire New York crowd chanting "f*** Ciryl Gane" before going after the champion's mother: "Hey, Ciryl, how's your mom doing? What's the difference between your mom and a washing machine? When I dump a load in the washing machine, she don't follow me around for nine months."
He went after Alex Pereira's mother too, with Pereira sitting in the front row, and led a chant insulting UFC CEO Dana White's "bald head." White has said he does not like Hokit's "shtick" but defended the title shot as earned rather than gifted — and Hokit repaid the defense by making the boss part of the act.
Gane would not take the bait. The champion conceded that Hokit deserved his title shot, and answered the theater with a measured response that stood in sharp contrast to the challenger. During a UFC Embedded episode, Gane explained that Hokit had even learned curse words in French to rattle him — and misused the word, so it does not offend him.
Hokit closed the night with the line the whole press conference had been building toward, aimed at a champion who had sat through all of it without answering back: "You ain't gonna do s* about it. You ain't gonna do s* about it. I just talked all this s***, and you didn't do nothing about it. What kind of champion are you? What kind of man are you? I'll kill you and then your family is mine."
Beyond the props and the profanity, Saturday night carries genuine stakes. Gane enters as the favorite, a technically precise Muay Thai specialist who has won 14 of his 17 professional fights, making the first defense of the undisputed heavyweight title he was promoted to in September after beating Pereira for the interim belt. Hokit is 10-0 in his career and 4-0 in the UFC, with recent wins over Curtis Blaydes and Derrick Lewis — but he has never faced anyone with Gane's striking pedigree or five-round championship experience.
The goggles got the laughs. On Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, Hokit has to show whether the man inside the costume can back up the loudest night of fight week.
