Josh Hokit is not just talking about pro wrestling as a curiosity. In a recent interview with Helen Yee Sports, the UFC heavyweight said he still goes back and watches old wrestling clips and angles, and he named Kane, Rey Mysterio and Sting as the performers he gravitated to when he was younger.
That matters because Hokit was speaking like a fan who never really left. He said Kane’s mask stood out to him, and he described the old shows as something he now watches for the acting and the characters. His comment lands differently today because MMA fighters are often cast as skeptics of pro wrestling, yet Hokit was describing the opposite instinct: he was looking at the performances and saying he gets why people liked them.
He put that plainly when he said he goes back and watches the clips and sees “good acting,” then starts noticing the angles behind the matches. In the same stretch of conversation, he pointed to Jake the Snake, Mr. Perfect and Macho Man as examples of the old-school names he revisits, along with the kind of storyline work that made those eras stick. He also said he had been watching the steroid era and understood why people liked it, which is a sharper admission than a casual nod to nostalgia. It was an MMA fighter explaining wrestling not as a guilty pleasure, but as something he now reads for craft.
That is where the friction sits. Hokit is coming from a combat sports world where pro wrestling is often treated as a target for jokes, yet he is describing it in the language of performance and character work. He is not pretending every part of it is real, and he is not dismissing it either. He is watching with the eye of someone trying to understand why the show worked in the first place.
The same interview also raised the bigger question around his future, because Hokit discussed the possibility of making the jump to WWE. The source does not spell out a timeline or a decision, so that remains the open part of the story. For now, the clearest takeaway is that Hokit is already doing the homework a wrestler would do: studying the names, the angles and the way old WWE-era characters held an audience.
