Getty Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers throws against the New Orleans Saints in 2020.
Is there anything Australian UFC champion Alexander Volkanovski can’t do?
He’s achieved a helluva lot, beating Jose Aldo, Max Holloway (three times) and Brian Ortega during a thrilling featherweight run toward the UFC’s No. 3 ranking.
And, it turns out, he can catch footballs, too, taking a pass from one of the best players to ever throw one — Tom Brady.
Volkanovski joined Brady onstage January 26 in Melbourne at a stop on his “An Evening With Tom Brady” speaking tour of Australia.
He caught Brady’s first pass — a light toss about 15 feet across the stage — with ease.
But the challenge wasn’t over.
“I can’t make it that easy,” Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl champ, said in a clip Volkanovski posted on Instagram.
“So sometimes I like to make it a little hard. … You’ve got to go right down the middle.”
As the crowd cheered, Volkanovski darted off the stage, down some steps and into the aisle, high-fiving sports fans along the way.
Volkanovski kept running, and running, and running until he got to what appeared to be the back of the venue.
Of course, Brady naturally heaved the pass with extraordinary accuracy, so Volkanovski caught the ball into his chest, much to the delight of the crowd.
“Brady to Volk,” the fighter wrote in his caption. “Touchdown!”
Alexander Volkanovski Is a Proven Multi-Sport Athlete
Catching a pass might’ve seemed like second nature to Volkanovski, 35, because before his UFC career, “The Great” could be found on rugby league fields playing ball for the Warilla Gorillas. The league even crowned him the best player in 2010.
During offseasons in rugby league, Volkanovski trained in Greco-Roman wrestling.
He also discovered he had mean fists, able to throw and land solid strikes. So he added the skill to his developing wrestling foundation.
Considering how much he loved to scrap, it wasn’t long before he left rugby league in 2010 at age 22 to train in MMA. Two years later he made his MMA debut, scoring a decision win over Gerhard Voigt at a regional show in Sydney, and the rest is history.
Alexander Volkanovski Returns to the Octagon to Headline UFC 298
Volkanovski is scheduled to fight Ilia Topuria in a UFC featherweight championship defense on Saturday, February 17 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California.
Volkanovski is expected to be determined to win the bout as he attempts to bounce back from last year’s loss to Islam Makhachev, his second to Makhachev.
Volkanovski has twice attempted to wrest the UFC lightweight belt from Makhachev’s waist and has twice returned to fight in the featherweight class in effort to recover from the defeats.
At the 135-pound weight class, though, Volkanovski has proved himself to be a formidable force through the years and, not including the losses at lightweight, has won all of his other matches at the UFC.
The upcoming UFC 298 event is a pay-per-view show featuring numerous other big bouts.
Here are the other main card fights:
- Robert Whittaker vs. Paulo Costa
- Geoff Neal vs. Ian Machado Garry
- Merab Dvalishvili vs. Henry Cejudo
- Anthony Hernandez vs. Roman Kopylov