Hokit Wore Goggles to Face Gane — and Harrison Needed Dana White Between Her and Nunes

Josh Hokit did not wait for a question. The heavyweight challenger stepped to Thursday's UFC 334 press conference wearing goggles and an athletic cup — protective gear as a punchline, aimed at the champion sitting a few seats away. The goggles were for Ciryl Gane's eye pokes, the ones that stopped the Tom Aspinall title fight at UFC 321 last October and have followed Gane ever since. The cup made the same point lower down. MMA Fighting reported that Hokit eventually took the goggles off for the staredown, so he could get a closer look at the man he fights on Saturday.

All ten main-card fighters took questions at the Infosys Theater at Madison Square Garden, Dana White ran the stage, and both title fights came out of it sounding less like matchups and more like grudges. The co-main event supplied the heat. The main event supplied the props.

The goggles were only the start

Hokit got the crowd chanting against Gane, then aimed a crude joke at the champion's mother and watched for a reaction that never came. "This is the champion? Get out of here!" he said, when Gane stayed quiet. He did not stop with the man across from him. Alex Pereira was in the front row to support his teammate Yousri Belgaroui, who fights Caio Borralho on Saturday, and Hokit turned on him too — a "Chama on his Mama" line that Pereira answered by standing up, raising his hands and laughing as he sat back down. Belgaroui kept telling Hokit to shut up. Nobody got physical, and the press conference ended with all of it still just talk.

Gane has spent the week refusing the bait. MMA Mania described him as largely unfazed while Hokit did the talking on Thursday, and his answer to the wider cheater label — the one Aspinall hung on him and Pereira's camp echoed after their interim fight in June — was already on the record this week. "I'm confident in who I am when I look in a mirror," he told RMC. "I know I'm not a cheater." He pointed to the referees who have worked his fights: ask them, he said, and they will tell you there is nothing special about him. White, for his part, separated the act from the record at the same press conference. He did not like Hokit's shtick, he said, but the challenger had earned this fight. That he absolutely did.

"Nobody's gonna protect you"

Kayla Harrison and Amanda Nunes did not need props. The two former American Top Team teammates went at each other across the table, and the argument underneath the argument was the gym they used to share. Harrison said they were protecting Nunes from her there. Nunes asked, after her résumé, whether Harrison seriously thought she was scared of her. Harrison said she did not care either way. "Nobody's gonna protect you on Saturday night," she told her. "And then you left the gym because you felt threatened by me. And now I'm here and it's gonna happen."

Nunes framed her return the same way she has all week: she is not a challenger walking into somebody else's era. "I'm not here as a challenger. I'm here as a double champ," she said, and on the training they shared, she gave Harrison a warning instead of a concession. "She never fight a lioness before. So this is another level kind of game." The belt, she said, is what brought her back — she messaged that she was ready when Harrison won it, and she intends to take it back. Harrison answered with a promise that reaches past Saturday: beat Nunes at 135, she said, and she will give her an automatic rematch at 145, "so I can snatch that other belt."

When it ended, the two faced off with White standing between them, and it still ran long enough that MMA Junkie's account of the staredown is headlined by White stepping in to end it. Harrison also closed the other question hanging over this fight: the neck surgery on five herniated discs that killed the first booking in January, two weeks out, is behind her. She told the press conference she is fully healed. Her last fight was winning this belt in June 2025. Nunes has not fought since June 2023.

What is left before Saturday

Friday is the scale. All 26 fighters on the 13-fight card step on it at the ceremonial weigh-ins, back at the Infosys Theater at 5 p.m. ET, and the co-main event brings its insurance policy with it: Joselyne Edwards, the official backup for Harrison–Nunes, weighs in too — the state of that division, and why the backup matters, is the piece this front published Wednesday. The heavyweight main event still has no named backup at all.

Saturday starts at 5 p.m. ET with the early prelims at Madison Square Garden, the main card at 9 p.m. ET on Paramount+ with no pay-per-view charge. Both previews are already on this front — Harrison–Nunes and Gane's week under the foul talk — and Thursday changed neither matchup. It changed the temperature. Hokit has one more stage to survive without starting something early, and Harrison and Nunes have run out of rooms to talk in.

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