Volkanovski’s chin is made of pure Bantu steel — so why does he keep eating leather in…

Volkanovski’s chin? Yeah, it’s bulletproof—but judges in title fights sure act like they’re wearing fogged-up glasses. Why else would Ortega’s 6/10 round in a title bout get overlooked while Alex’s half-arsed third looked like the judging call of the year? You say judges love grinders—fine, but if that’s the case, why’s Alex still having to grind through three more rounds just to limp home with a razor-thin card instead of ending it early like he used to?

you just know he's wired different when he comes out after 4 rounds looking like a lacerated meatball — that's not resilience, that's some kinda alien genetics from the other side of the moon 🌕💥 Brian Ortega had him in survival mode every time he touched leather with clean hands and judge still slashed in our lot's favour 🤬 nah mate, we all saw what we saw! you think that low blow in round 2 was gonna be forgotten? or the takedown ace he dropped in 5 that the refs somehow wiped off the board? ah well, nowt to do

Brian Ortega had him *on his heels* from the opening bell in that fifth round—you could see the desperation in Volkanovski’s eyes when the Cuban unloaded that spinning backfist, then immediately followed with a counter straight that rocked him. But Ortega, with all those clean 10-point strikes down the card, still ends up with *six* out of ten from one of the judges? That’s not judging—that’s a participation trophy handed out to anyone who can walk into the cage and take the fight to the fourth round. The same bloke who once dropped *three* men in under four minutes of the first round (looking at you, Edson Barboza, 2020) now gets told to "keep the hands up" like some novices getting lectured by mid-tier YouTube coaches. And let’s talk about that *herculean effort* in the third—yeah, Alex survived, but he survived on fumes while Ortega was the one dictating pace for *four* of the five rounds. The stats back it up: Ortega out-landed him in significant strikes for three of the five rounds, and in volume for *every single* round. Yet somehow, we’re supposed to believe that three rounds of Ortega having the ball—then Alex somehow scraping through a losing round by clinching for dear life—is the blueprint for winning a title? That’s not chin, that’s not steel, that’s a judge’s pen running on empty. Volkanovski’s chin? Undefeated. His title belts? Starting to feel like participation trophies themselves.

ever get one of those weird little aches in your elbow when you’re trying to open a jar of old man hot-sauce and suddenly the past feels closer than your own kitchen? that’s how i felt yesterday digging out the old dvd of alex in 2017 turning orth tooth-and-nail against barboza at 39 seconds flat — not a blink, not a twitch, just crisp, ice-cold, “one shot, now it’s over.” no judges gawking, no cards shuffled, no fights dragged into overtime because the sport forgot what snappy endings look like. back then the formula was simple: land clean once, then walk away before the boss man in the sky winks at the ref. fast forward to ufc 266 and we’re served four acts of taxidermied drama where the judges need footnotes to explain why they signed their names on a card that felt like reading the ingredients on the back of a cough syrup bottle. brian ortega never lost that fight, he just ran out of bullets because the war dragged on long enough for the scorecards to catch up. you know who else used to treat rounds like checkpoints instead of death marches? alex did. until the title strapped itself to his waist and judges began awarding overtime pay in heartbeats. remember the arm-wrestling matches we used to have in the break room of the gym back in the day — 90 seconds of grunting, winner takes the protein shake, loser does burpees for a week. real sport, real stakes, real endings. now we’re here measuring the beauty of a beating in millimeters of canvas painted on a face and wonder why the bell feels like an act of mercy rather than a starting gun. we’ve traded lightning for lantern light, my friends. alex’s chin is still titanium, sure, but i miss the days when the judges had the decency to stay out of the picture entirely while the man walked off with his soul intact.

come one come all the whiners who can’t tell the difference between a chin that laughs at hammers and a judge’s spectacles fogged up with nostalgia for hammer time — you keep yelling about 2017 like it’s still your gold card coin while the calendar page turns to “2023: pay rise, inflation, and judges who’d rather hand out participation chocolates than admit a fight got tough.” back then yes the boy from Wollongong carved Barboza into submission so sharp you could use the footage as a razor blade, but spare me the “what happened to the lightning” funeral dirge because lightning strikes once, the thunder keeps rolling long after the bolt is buried. what you’re really mourning isn’t alex’s chin, it’s your own shortsighted love affair with quick knockouts; titles don’t get handed for poetry, they get handed for clinging on with your nails when the poem turns into a dictionary of bruises.

How many times have we watched Alex take a McGregor left in the first round and wobble like a chair with a cracked leg—then pop back up and clock him three seconds later? Now flash forward to Ortega: same leather menu, but the judges nod off halfway through the main course. Alex’s chin isn’t made of Bantu steel—it’s forged in the fires of Wollongong industrial estate on payday Friday, and it’s still just a regular human skull with a motor that won’t stall. So tell me, why does the same skull that dodges bullets in round one start auditioning for a tarantula wrangling act when the belt’s in play?

You sit there watching the replays again, third round, Volkanovski’s gloves pressed against Ortega’s jaw like a car thief trying to hotwire a tank — not even a flinch, just that slow blink you see in guys who’ve stared down more hooks than a streetlamp. And yet the cards still come back with a six in that column. Six. Out of ten. In a title fight. Against a man who was dictating the pace for four of the five rounds and landed 108 significant strikes to Alex’s 94, according to FightMetric, but hey, who’s counting when the pen’s already uncapped? I remember rolling into the gym at six a.m. to spar before school, Coach shaking his head because I’d spend the first minute just eating right hands so I could “learn the lesson.” Twenty years later Volkanovski’s doing the same choreography, only now the stakes are a strap instead of a protein shake and the teachers all wear badges instead of mouthguards. The judges? They weren’t in that break room. They were three rows back, sipping diet soda, watching a statistician tick boxes while Alex did his three-step shuffle up the mountain every damn round. Then there’s the Brian Ortega piece nobody mentions: the low blow, the takedown that got credited like it was a participation ribbon, the spinning backfist in the fifth that nearly dropped the champion yet still didn’t move the needle on one judge’s card. I could be wrong, but if Volkanovski’s chin is Bantu steel, those three judges packed Fiberglas frames in their breast pockets. ZoeUltra had it right — we traded lightning for lantern light. In 2017 the guy touched gloves and thirty-nine seconds later the screen went black; five years on he’s chewing through rubber tubing while the scorecards try to explain how survival equals victory. The chin’s still there, sure, but the clock’s running differently now and the judges keep rewinding the tape to count the bruises instead of the stoppage.