Justin Gaethje could make his final walk to the octagon at UFC 324.
“The Highlight” headlines the Jan. 24 event opposite Paddy Pimblett, with the lightweight contenders vying for an interim championship with undisputed champion Ilia Topuria currently sidelined as he deals with personal matters. Though the 37-year-old Gaethje has never offered a definitive timetable for his retirement, his coach Trevor Wittman sees UFC 324 as a logical endpoint depending on the result.
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Wittman told ESPN MMA that Gaethje could leave his gloves in the cage if he loses to Pimblett.
“I’m not feeling it, I’m just saying it,” Wittman said. “The whole thing is I want to keep everybody grateful and Justin’s a very smart guy. He understands and he’s the one that I can have conversations with. A lot of the times when you have a conversation with a fighter—I want to have that conversation with a lot of guys—I don’t want to break their mentality. Justin’s like one of those unbreakable mindsets. He’s very smart when it comes to how his family feels about fighting. He’s also very smart when it comes to longevity. All combat sports, all contact sports bring long-term issues. The No. 1 thing is this is first a hobby, second a career, and then you’ve got to leverage it, and Justin’s very smart when it comes to stuff like that. So when we have these conversations, it’s man to man, and I’m not afraid to speak it out loud.
“This is our last run. If we don’t win this fight, we’re not going on. We’re not going to go out there and be a gatekeeper and look at money fights and shit like that.”
Gaethje has been competing since 2011 and across 31 pro bouts he has been part of some of the most memorable and beloved fights in MMA history. His all-action style and incredible knockout power has resulted in him winning numerous UFC post-fight bonuses, including nine Fight of the Night awards.
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He has won three of his past four fights, recently winning a decision over Rafael Fiziev to bounce back from a brutal knockout loss to Max Holloway. Should he become interim champion a second time, Wittman thinks that would be enough incentive for Gaethje to compete a few more times.
“He would fight over and over and over, but he knows he’s got to be there for the family,” Wittman said. “He’s got to be smart and take care of his health, but we win this belt, my shoot-to-the-moon type of goal would be let’s go out there and repeat defenses. Repeat defenses.
“Obviously, this is an interim title fight, so we’re not the champ yet, so we’d have to go win that belt next. I always say the key to being the champion is one round at a time. One round at a time gets you one fight at a time. once you get to one fight at a time, then you start to get to the championship level. So we’re not overlooking this, but we’re honest that it gets to a point where we have that roadblock, we can’t overcome those roadblocks no more. He’s 37 years old and we want to be smart.”
Though Wittman provided plenty of perspective on why UFC 324 could potentially mark Gaethje’s final fight, he made it clear the team is not treating it as a surefire retirement bout since he wants the fighter to be fully committed to victory and not have one foot out the door.
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“This is not a retirement fight,” Wittman said. “When it comes to retirement fights, I think anybody going out on a retirement fight is going to win one out of 10 times, because you’re already letting go. He’s not letting go.
“He was just in his position, where we were, we had just been knocked out for a year, we had a title fight, they offered the fight with Max, he didn’t want it. Pretty much everybody around the fight, including myself, was like, ‘Hey, this is an opportunity to go out there and do your thing from that upper echelon,’ which, when you’re told something, it’s never guaranteed, we know that. But Justin’s one of those company men that he’s always done right for the company and for the fans and he’s a people fighter. His goal when he first got with me was like, ‘Every time I fight, when you buy a pay-per-view or you buy a ticket to be in the arena, you’re going to be so grateful that you bought that ticket.‘ And he’s done that.”
