Some Thoughts on UFC 329, In No Particular Order
Greatest fight night in UFC history. On so many levels. I have never cheered harder.
Paddy Pimblett is the kind of UFC fighter that shows why this sport will never entirely be what the Epstein class wants it to be. No more than boxing ever has been. He’s a working-class socialist from Liverpool who cares about people, and also he’s a badass who does superhuman shit, and right now he is top of the fucking world. Saturday he invented a new submission on the fly. He accepted a former French special forces operative’s takedown as tribute, took the neck on the way in, and improvised his way into a new kind of choke that put the man out cold in 52 seconds. “I’ve never done that before! Mad!” He said afterwards, delight in his eyes. Wizard.
If you want to know who Paddy actually is: a few years ago, his friend died by suicide hours before his weigh-in. He fought anyway, won, and used his post-fight interview to tell men to talk about their feelings before it’s too late. Go watch it. That’s the guy who’s now top five in the deepest division in the sport.
The one-two of Paddy literally inventing new jiu-jitsu against one of the most dangerous men alive, and then… Conor. Conor McGregor. Busting up his own leg with a dumb, nonsensical opening and essentially beating himself immediately. Max Holloway didn’t even have to take a punch in this stupid fight that never should have happened. Incredible.
Max Holloway, for the record: legend, family man, genuine community hero and source of pride for Native Hawaiians, married to a badass and beautiful professional surfer, dedicated father. In my own well-meaning but meaningless opinion, he should retire and enjoy the fruits of his impressive labors and legacy with his beautiful family. Perhaps I was projecting, but post fight, his wife looked so psyched he didn’t take a punch. I was so happy for her. But more than likely Max will be back, and I at least have no standing to comment other than as a fan who wants him to keep as much of his mind as he can for as long as he can. “I owe my family some time,” he did say. But, well, he’s still Max Holloway.
They got to smirk in Conor’s face while he limped out. Max, his wife, all of them. The whole arena. So many fighters with a history with the man in the room when that knee buckled.
They got to smirk in his face, with pity in their eyes. While he ate it. He limped away as quickly as he could but it was long enough. He ate it up. We watched.
And understand — not comeuppance. He’s eaten comeuppance before. Khabib mauling him, the Poirier knockouts: those were the villain getting what he deserved, and he was willing to play that, eat it in public, because comeuppance is a debt inside the story, and he always believed he’d pay it back. That was the whole wager: take the hatred and the losses on credit against the redemption. Because that’s not just where the big money is. That’s where the tawdry egoistic immortality he has always chased can be claimed. That’s where the impunity is. In the redemption.
Fear, envy, hatred, even watching him get his. Every one of those treats him as an agent, a man who might still do something. Pity is the first crowd emotion that treats him as finished. And what the arena felt Saturday was the terminal kind: the pity you feel for an old man past his prime, dressed in the costume of his younger self (the debut mohawk, for Christ’s sake) still trying to be what he was back when he felt great, with no chance of reaching even the ghost of it.
Comeuppance keeps the account open. Pity closes it. He could metabolize hatred forever; hatred is just envy with the sign flipped. Pity is the one input the construct has no process for, and he got a whole arena of it, at the top of the highest-grossing gate in UFC history.
He said it himself. Post “fight”, he tweeted it: can “only describe this as hell.” And it is. He made it. He has to live in it now. And he let us watch. We don’t owe him gratitude for that, not to him. But I am grateful for the experience of watching years and years of just deserts shoved down his throat with barely a punch thrown.
Yes, it’s all content. It also all actually happened. That’s the thing about this sport. Wrestling is pantomime — honest fakery, everyone always knew, mall-Santa rules, nothing wrong with it. Reality TV is the opposite crime: real people, dishonest frame. MMA is the one place where the story can reach into the cage and break a leg but doesn’t get to pick whose. The comeback narrative is what put a 37-year-old yacht-dwelling body in there against one of the most active fighters alive. The story wrote a check and the anatomy cashed it. The house sold a record gate and still didn’t get the ending it paid for.
This is the man who posted “Ireland, we are at war” while Dublin burned in far-right riots in November 2023, and “You reap what you sow” as it spread. Who got hosted at Trump’s White House on St. Patrick’s Day 2025 (instead of the actual Taoiseach) to declare Ireland was losing its Irishness to an “illegal immigration racket,” a statement his own government had to publicly disown. Who launched a presidential run off it and slunk out of the race by September. And who a Dublin civil jury found liable for assaulting Nikita Hand — a quarter million euro in damages — after which his appeal collapsed in July 2025 when his “fresh evidence” was withdrawn on day one under circumstances so strange the judges said they were bemused, the whole mess got referred for a perjury investigation, and the Supreme Court declined to hear another word of it.
Many someones have posted on bluesky and x (the everything app) some variation of a joke on Conor’s favorite recent catchphrase: “the Mac is back... in surgery.” Perfect. No notes.
And we should understand what McGregor made of himself, because it’s not really an Irish thing, I don’t think. That’s part of what makes him so offensive. No, McGregor made himself an avatar of the worst *American* Irish thing, a golem of it. The grasping. The desire, so strong, to be fully and wholly white. The Irish in America bought their whiteness by turning on whoever arrived after them, of course. And sure, Conor’s been importing that move back into Ireland itself, running the assimilationist grasp in the one country where the Irish were the colonized, not the climbers.
But “Ireland is at war” with migrants is Boston 1863 logic transplanted to Dublin. The whiskey brand, the suits, the yacht, the Trump White House on St. Patrick’s Day of all days. The high holy day of plastic-Paddy kitsch.
He didn’t go there as an Irishman. He went as an American cartoon of one and was received as such by our cartoon reality tv-host president. He has embodied the worst impulses of the American Irish narrative for a buck so hard, they have embodied him back. I hope he stews in them. I hope he cooks for a long time.
Nobody beat him. That’s the important part. There’s no opponent to blame, no “I got caught,” no rematch that fixes anything. He threw one flying kick and his own knee delivered the verdict. And it was the opposite leg from the Poirier break that left him rolling and screaming slander at his opponent’s wife on the mat, in case one made the mistake of thinking this was just an old wound. And not a fresh judgment.
He is an awful man who used his gifts in the most selfish ways possible, and he hasn’t just been retired, he’s had his legacy destroyed. By himself. In front of everyone.
Saturday was watching someone fully and completely find out. He will never be Conor McGregor again. Great fight.
Now Paddy. Up next, lad. Nothing plastic about him.
Paddy is from Liverpool. Liverpool is one of the other Irish diasporas. The one that never made the purchase. Stayed at the docks, stayed poor, stayed hated by England, kept the solidarity politics instead of trading them in. Hillsborough is what England does to people who never got bought in. So underneath the card, Saturday was the two forks of the diaspora: the branch that grasped upward into whiteness, and the branch that stayed down with its class. One of them choked out a commando in 52 seconds. The other one’s knee exploded on the biggest stage the empire could build for him.
And that symbolism. The man Paddy put to sleep Saturday is a former French special forces commando whom the French identitarian right has spent years trying to claim as its champion — Génération Identitaire’s heirs literally ran promotions with his face on them. (His camp has formally objected to the appropriation, in terms carefully sized to reject the groupuscule and nothing else. But the far right does not much care whether its icons consent, and its icons rarely say more than they must.)
Meanwhile Ilia Topuria, who Paddy has been gleefully calling out for years, runs a fight promotion where Vox’s Santiago Abascal and Isabel Díaz Ayuso sit ringside like it’s a court appearance, got his start sponsored by a far-right eviction outfit, complained about having to walk through the foreigners’ line at the airport after being handed Spanish citizenship, and kissed the disgraced King Emeritus on the forehead at a UFC event.
It was a good and correct thing that Justin Gaethje beat his face in on the White House lawn last month to take the belt — and Gaethje is half Mexican, his mother’s from Sonora, so if you want to think of it like this, that fight was a tough-as-nails half-Mexican redneck beating the shit out of the Spanish nationalist right’s favorite son. In front of Trump, who paid for the privilege. I do want to think of it like that.
And it’s hopefully Topuria vs. Paddy next, please. I want to see him pass the fuck out too. One wrinkle: Gaethje is sitting on the belt and he’s the one guy on earth with a recent win over Paddy. The revenge arc might have to route through the redneck first. Fine by me.
So: Paddy is a working-class, community-supported scouser beating his way through the assorted mascots of the international right, willing or otherwise, and McGregor — the Irish franchise of the same operation — took himself out in the main event without Paddy having to lift a finger. I don’t want to take anything away from Max, who has one of his own, but I do think it was at least in part Paddy’s aura that blew out that sad, embarrassed old man’s knee for him. It was Paddy’s night. Conor was just there to draw the requisite attention.
A good night for the not-Nazis, symbolically. And again: it’s tremendous content.
About Paddy and England, since the UFC billed Saturday as “England vs. France.” This is a man who, in his first interview at sixteen years old, three fights into his career, was asked where he was from and answered with the name of the football club he supported — and had to be told, no lad, that’s your club, where are you FROM — before saying Liverpool. This is not an Englishman. This is a scouser. More Irish than anything else, and harder used than most. The English were the ones in charge, from Paddy’s perspective, same as in Dublin until 1922 and in Derry until now, basically. He’s said it plain: why would scousers support England when England sings songs about hating us, when the Hillsborough dead got smeared by the English press for decades. Fuck the Tories. That’s a quote.
At the pre-fight presser, with England playing a World Cup quarterfinal the same night as his fight, a reporter asked which one he was more excited about. Paddy: “What do you think, lad — something that eleven other fellas are gonna do, or something that I’m gonna do? It was a bad question.” Then he predicted Argentina would slap England in the semis.
He doesn’t give a shit about the English. He doesn’t give a shit what I think of him. He doesn’t give a shit what any of you think of him. He cares about what the people back home think, and he cares about what he thinks. My read is he’s relaxing a bit on the politics until he gets the belt, and then he’s going to lay some waste on that front. Or maybe he won’t. But I think he will.
Either way. He’ll fight anyone you put in front of him.