NEW YORK – Uros Medic has been driving and striving and hugging the turns, proverbially speaking, and he doesn’t plan on stopping until he’s gone the distance.
Medic (14-3 MMA, 8-3 UFC) has been eating tons of celebratory cake lately with four straight first-round finishes at welterweight. All 14 of his wins are by stoppage, including a dozen knockouts. But Saturday on the UFC 334 (Paramount+) main card at Madison Square Garden, Medic will be faced with a type of opponent he hasn’t come across before: Kevin Holland (29-15 MMA, 16-12 UFC), famous for in-fight talk, trash or otherwise, against opponents that often leaves them rattled.
Medic has prepared for that to not be the case.
“I’ve seen his fights in the past,” Medic told MMA Junkie at Wednesday’s
media day. “He's a big name. He's fought very, very big fights. He's a very tricky fighter, very unorthodox – probably not very easy to deal with. On top of that, he has an aspect of the big mouth, where that's another factor to consider in the fight. But I'm excited for this challenge. I think it's a big challenge for me, and I think I am skilled enough and I'm ready enough.”
Medic said a few training partners tried to mimic Holland’s chatter, which might help when it comes time to deal with that aspect.
But that’s only if Medic lets Holland go long enough to start talking. His four straight wins in the past 15 months have come in an average of 59 seconds. And it’s not like they’ve been against chumps: Gilbert Urbina, Muslim Salikhov, Geoff Neal and Daniel Rodriguez all have felt Medic’s missile of a left hand.
Even though Holland’s never been knocked out, Medic wants to be the first.
“Some (training partners) did talk to me just because it would be funny,” Medic said. “It does throw you off a little bit. You're in the middle of thinking through your moves and all of a sudden he's talking some smack and I'm having to reset. But it has been something I've experienced in training.
“I'm going to try (to knock him out). At the very least, it'll be a doctor stoppage.”
Medic has been surging up the UFC’s welterweight rankings. He sits at No. 9 in the Meta rankings. He’s fighting down – No. 15 – against Holland, but the name value is hard to pass up for him.
A win may not get him a title shot at 170 pounds, but he’s already living a storybook situation, he said, by winning five of his past six, all in the first round, after a bit of a rough start in the UFC.
“Life writes the most unbelievable stories,” Medic said. “I mentioned in the past that I will be ranked in 2026; I could not have imagined that it would go this far. But it does make sense, because I've been striving and working hard toward this ranking and toward this career. I'm not surprised that it's gotten this far, but I'm also not done. There's so much more work to be done, so I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing best.”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: No one’s knocked out Kevin Holland? Uros Medic likes that challenge at UFC 334
