The first-ever MITHY Awards: MMA's best (and most serious) sendoff for 2024

Introducing the first-ever MITHY Awards (Man in the Hat Year-End Awards). We hear a lot about the best fighters and fights and cards at the end of the year, but this is where you get the important stuff. Like Funniest Fighter. And the Greatest Fib of 2024.

You ready? Here goes nothing.

Best Walkout

The UFC has always been a bit of a buzzkill when it comes to walkouts. We don’t get the over-the-top pageantry of boxing, and — as a sport with good taste — we don’t see fighters entering in the back of a Chevy C3500 like Jake Paul did for his bout with Mike Tyson. They’ll drop the lights for the feature attractions and crank up the amps, but that’s about it. Everything else is up to the fighter.

This category belongs to Alex Pereira. His walkouts have become total theater. The warrior stutter walk he does is a ceremony that carries its own import, but when he stops and fires that imaginary arrow at his opponent and lets out that neck-bulging scream? Iconic. It helps that he’s made that walk with an escalation of stakes and circumstances, as he was the savior of both UFC 300 and UFC 303. By the time we hit UFC 307, it felt like we were all part of a time-honored ritual of the Pataxó.

Coolest Vibes

It might be tempting to give this award to Pereira too, given that his emotional range is confined to Easter Island. But this one goes to a different islander, Max Holloway. It would be good enough to say that Holloway has earned the distinction of “cool” over the course of the past 15 years, given the big fights, the titles, the drip, all of it.

But there will never be an act of cool that outdoes Holloway at UFC 300. Fighting for the BMF title against the public’s will, Holloway never heard his critics and advisors as they admonished him for moving up a weight class to fight Justin Gaethje just as his path to a featherweight title has opened back up. He just said, “It’s a Waianae thing,” and pointed out that he’s a fighter. Fighters fight. Fighters don’t give into common doubt. Actions speak the language of the people. Things ordinary folks wouldn’t understand.

So when he schooled Gaethje for five rounds, before pointing to the canvas and knocking him out with a second left on the clock, it was as if Hollywood scripted the most ridiculous sequence for the hero just as the credits were to roll.

That was pure vibe.

Best Corners

Admittedly we have a narrow lens here, as there are so many corner combos that deserve to be mentioned, yet we are a start-up franchise at the MITHYs and this assignment was sprung on us. We could talk about the Eric Nicksick/Dewey Cooper corners, or the Khabib Nurmagomedov/Javier Mendez combos, which are all great. Anytime the Jackson/Wink/Gibson factions roll out is special.

But for me — for the year of our Lord, 2024 — it’s going to be Ray Longo/Aljamain Sterling. Namely because these Long Island based gentlemen and real estate agents have the right blend of cheerleading capacity to go along with true expertise.

Longo looks like a wise guy. Let’s just say it. But he is the sweetest ambassador you’ll find for a fighter, and when they introduce one of his fighters — as they did Merab Dvalishvili at UFC 306 — Longo is in the height of heaven. He's encouraging the crowd to cheer or boo, no matter. And when he sees a weakness with the opposition, everyone can hear him shouting about it from the Sphere all the way to the Hoover Dam.

The Nate Landwehr “Never Say Die” Award

This award, which we will name after Nate Landwehr (who dramatically — and impossibly — turned the tables on David Onama in 2022 and ruined a good many parlays), is for the best comeback in a fight.

We saw some good ones in 2024. There was Neil Magny’s reversal of fortunes on Mike Malott at UFC 297, after basically losing for 13 minutes straight. There was Jack Della Maddalena’s unthinkable comeback against Gilbert Burns. Remember when Jalin Turner knocked Renato Moicano down and it looked like the fight was over? It wasn’t. Moicano stormed back to win. So did Gerald Meerschaert in that fight where he got knocked down and out like 80 times against Edmen Shahbazyan.

Those are all fine nominees, but Dustin Poirier weathering the storm against Benoit Saint-Denis is the choice here. It wasn’t that he was losing the fight (which he was) or that the UFC matchmakers booked him against a young gun as a natural baton pass to the next generation (they did), it was that Poirier refused these terms. He refused to believe his career was on the downswing, or that he couldn’t compete with the monsters on deck.

He refused to cede his spot in line. To be washed. To be forgotten.

So that comeback was for all the fighters in that situation who are forced to go gently into that good night. Poirier refused.

Greatest Upset By An Underdog Nobody Saw Coming

I’m going to give the nod here to Aiemann Zahabi, who was a +700 underdog by the time he made the walk against Javid Basharat back in March.

This fight was supposed to be nothing more than a formality for Basharat, a breezy full show-and-purse pouch that would springboard him to a truer challenge. Zahabi? He looked like Ariel Helwani but he fought like Georges St-Pierre, a Montreal relish tray of astonishment that had longshot bettors texting out their winning tickets to any degenerate with the flexibility to kick himself.

Worst Favorite That Lost

Wang Cong. Oh, Wang Cong.

Gabriella Fernandes’ victory over Cong at UFC Macau was a shocker. Cong, who’d defeated Valentina Shevchenko back in the day in a kickboxing match, was a throw-in sweetener on parlays (-950 on some books) as she was getting the chance to showcase herself. Victory was supposed to be a foregone conclusion.

Fernandes said to hell with the odds and won via submission. Only diehard fans and gamblers felt the impact of this upset, but it was a friendly reminder that to take anything for granted in MMA is to take a full-blown groin shot from the MMA Gods. Some bettors needed to take the full five minutes to recover. Some of them couldn’t continue.

Most Gruesome Cut

In the book "Into Thin Air," Jon Krakauer talks a lot about crossing deadly crevasses on Everest, these huge chasms in the mountain that — for the careless climber — can swallow humans whole.

The cut that Irene Aldana suffered at UFC 306 in her fight against Norma Dumont reminded me of this. It was a trench that ran from just below the hairline down to the bridge of the nose, two flaps of meat on either side, blood pooling in the middle just enough to obscure the slick skull. As Dan Hardy once said when talking about Diego Sanchez in his brutal fight against BJ Penn, “you could practically see [her] thoughts.”

I mean, that was a true crimson mask Aldana wore. She looked like the last survivor in a slasher film, who felt the blade of an ax but somehow persevered. The lesson to be found in this extreme exhibition of gore?

Don’t mess with Norma Dumont…

Funniest Fighter

Paddy Pimblett.

I know, I know, some people hate him. They don’t like that he balloons up to 300 pounds (or whatever) when not fighting, or that he beefs with Helwani, but when he calls people “sausage” it cracks me up. So far he’s called Renato Moicano, Tony Ferguson and Jake Paul all “sausages,” which has a certain kind of sizzle to it.

As for Caolán Loughran? Well, Paddy called “The Don” a “little sausage,” which almost felt like an honorarium.

Most Serious Fighter

Movsar Evloev.

It’s almost funny how serious he is.

Most Unlikely MMA Fan

There are plenty of unlikely MMA fans, from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to Justin Bieber and everyone’s favorite aunt Anthony Kiedis, yet I think this year we’ll go with Zach Bryan.

Bryan isn’t the guy who sings “Chicken Fried,” that’s Zac Brown, but he is the one who dated Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia, so a little confusion is to be expected. Anyway, most of his songs have to do with love, relationships, cowboys in Brooklyn and broader western sentimentalities, such as trying to escape Oklahoma.

Whether or not he’s your scene, MMA definitely wouldn’t seem to be his. But it is. He follows everything, from the pay-per-views to the Contender Series. He loves himself some Diego Lopes. The fists and blood even out the majesties and poetic meanings of the orange.

It’s an unlikely pairing. But you know what? We’ll take him.

Greatest Fib Told in 2024

Technically it wasn’t done deliberately, as it was offered with the best intentions. But when they handed Dana White a piece of paper torn from a spiral note pad right after UFC 300 and announced that Conor McGregor would fight Michael Chandler at UFC 303 in June, there was an audible gasp among the newsmongers. At long last we’d see the return of McGregor, and Chandler — devoted to the idea of fighting McGregor since the days of Semaphore — would be rewarded for his patience.

Ha! Those intentions were indeed good. But the greatest fib of 2024 was the one we told ourselves that that fight was happening at all. A broken toe kept McGregor out then, and a zillion other things conspired to keep him out the rest of the year. The odds that McGregor competes next in the UFC or in India are now even money, and the latter is an early candidate for Greatest Fib Told in 2025.

Blue Balls Special of 2025

When the PFL brought Jon Jones out to Georgia and had him square off with its prized heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou? Yeah, that wasn’t nice.

His Excellency doth have an ounce of the coquet in him. After spending the bulk of 2023 wondering if that fight could happen (when it was still able to!), 2024 was littered with the tease of all teases.

Well, right next to that aforementioned McGregor-Chandler fight…