Khamzat Chimaev reacts to Kevin Holland calling him “wannabe street”: “Forget that last slap I gave you?”

Kevin Holland is very familiar with Khamzat Chimaev’s habit of getting in the faces of UFC athletes on fight week. Back in September of 2020, Chimaev accosted him at the UFC fighter hotel, getting physical with ‘Trailblazer’ over an Instagram comment about wearing masks.

“He only does this extra wannabe street s*** when the media is around,” Holland said during UFC 279 media day interviews. “Other than that, he doesn’t do it. When you guys aren’t around, he wants to do fist bumps and he wants to be your best friend. When you guys are around, he’s like, I’m going to rip your head off! You ain’t ripping s*** off dog, you just want a paycheck like the rest of these guys around here.”

Those words caught Chimaev’s attention, who responded in the comments to the Instagram.

“Did you forget that last slap I gave you at the hotel?” he wrote (via The MMA Media). “Do you want one more?!”

https://twitter.com/The_MMA_Media/status/1567836749107286016

Holland replied “Slap? LOL boy you pushed like you’re in middle school then ran to your corners. Not to mention you tried for a fist bump me to say sorry. You’re cap, kid.”

The 2020 incident between Khamzat Chimaev and Kevin Holland went down in the days leading up to UFC Vegas 11. Holland was fighting Darren Stewart at that event (in a bout he’d win by split decision), and Khamzat Chimaev was fighting Gerald Meerschaert (which ended in 17 seconds via a Chimaev KO).

“He commented something under an Instagram post about me, ‘Where is your mask’ when I was helping this one guy, but I didn’t know I was being recorded,” Chimaev recounted to ZubaTV. “He wrote something like ‘It’s all good but where’s your mask? You can infect him.’ Something like that. I came up to him in the hotel and asked ‘What did you mean by that?’ He answered, I don’t really remember, but ‘What about it?’ or something like that.”

“I grabbed his neck and pushed him away. Then when people were holding me, he started ‘blah blah blah.’ Typical American thing, just talking without doing anything.”

“He pushed me,” Holland said when asked about the incident at the UFC Vegas 11 post-fight press conference. “He pushed me and said I was ‘the help.’ I mean, we did start a COVID cleaning business, but goddamn, I don’t work at the hotel. And don’t tell the people you don’t know who I am when we got into a little thing at the thing.”

“I don’t know,” Holland continued. “The guy, he’s playing a role. What you see from me is what you get. What you see from some of these other guys is what you get. Kind of reminds me of a Jon Jones situation. You wanna be this, you wanna be that, but when the s*** hits the fan we find out who you truly are. So give it a couple of years, you’ll find out who that guy really is, right?”

Holland is on a two fight win streak after returning to welterweight following a 0-2-1 skid at middleweight in 2021. Between those losses and the weightclass switch-up, Holland isn’t even currently ranked in the official UFC 170-pound rankings. So if he’s looking to settle the score with Chimaev outside of hotel lobbies and comment sections, he’ll have to beat Daniel Rodriguez at UFC 279 and then several ranked opponents before being able to face ‘Borz,’ who sits in the top five.