Borislav Nikolić is the new BRAVE CF Bantamweight world champion after turning a bout he was losing into a title-changing finish on 7 June 2025 at Hala Tivoli. Nicholas Hwende had controlled the fight for three rounds, but Nikolić found a late opening, surged forward in the fourth and locked in a ninja choke at 1:42 to take the belt.
The result mattered because it changed the top of the BRAVE CF bantamweight division in one round. Nikolić, 33, now carries a 16-2 record, with seven knockouts and eight submissions among his sixteen wins, and he remains unbeaten by strikes. For a fighter known as Zombi, the title came the hard way: after three rounds in which his right eye had swollen shut, he still had enough left to force the finish.
That championship win also gives a sharper shape to the long path that led him there. Nikolić was born on 29 January 1993 in Vršac, in Vojvodina, fought at bantamweight, and before MMA spent eleven years as a holding midfielder in soccer. He says that game taught him to read what was coming, win the ball and control the pace, a habit that fits a fighter who has built his career on fast endings. He ran his amateur record to 10-0 at Titan Fight Team, trained for two years without taking a fight, then moved to MMA Tim CDS when university took him to Belgrade before later working at Renzo Gracie Secutor and returning to CDS in Novi Sad.
The path to the belt was not smooth. His first professional loss came on 1 April 2021 at BRAVE CF 50, when Brad Katona caught him in a guillotine forty seconds into the third round. His second came on 6 August 2022, a unanimous decision loss to Gamzat Magomedov, after which he disappeared for 13 months. The reason for that absence is not given, but the timing matters: Nikolić returned in September 2023 and knocked out Ali Guliev in 94 seconds, then ran off a six-fight win streak that included another win over Guliev, a stoppage of Eqiyuebu with elbows and punches inside a round, and a second-round guillotine of Cleuber Cabral.
What makes the title change more striking is how close he came to being outworked before the turnaround. BRAVE CF described the build-up to the Hwende fight as genuinely bad-tempered, and the bout itself looked lopsided until Nikolić flipped it late. He was marked up, trailing and apparently running out of room, then suddenly had the cleaner exchanges and the choke that ended it. He keeps 120 beehives, which fits the same stubborn image: a fighter who seems built for long work, then a burst when everything finally opens.
The belt now sits with a fighter who has spent most of his career making fights end in dramatic fashion, but the unanswered question is the next one. BRAVE CF has not named his next opponent or a return date, so the new champion leaves Hala Tivoli with the title and no clear map beyond it.
