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Former UFC fighter TJ Grant is widely considered to be one of the biggest “what ifs” in UFC history.
His last fight with the promotion, and in his entire mixed martial arts career to date, took place back at UFC 160 in May 2013.
That night, he beat Gray Maynard via TKO to seemingly earn himself a UFC lightweight title shot against then-champion Benson Henderson.
The curious case of TJ Grant
The win against Maynard took TJ Grant up to a five-fight winning streak and a 21-5 overall pro MMA record. A title bout with Henderson was booked for UFC 164 in August. Unfortunately, it never quite came to fruition, with Grant being pulled out due to injury.
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The man who replaced him? Anthony Pettis.
Pettis went on to win that fight and the title, with a showdown against TJ Grant then being booked for the end of the year in December.
Once again Grant wasn’t able to make that deadline and had to say no to fighting for the title for a second time.
In May 2014, after months of frustration, Grant was removed from the UFC rankings alongside Nate Diaz, with the reason being cited as “inactivity”.
Grant would later make it known that he likely wasn’t going to be returning to mixed martial arts, due to him being in debt and not wanting to get into even more debt.
Now, at the age of 37, fans still look back on that period of the lightweight division with great confusion.
The popular opinion has always been that he would’ve beaten Benson Henderson to become champion and from there, could’ve gone on to do some really big things.
Alas, that didn’t happen, but in the present day he does seem to be happy with his life and how things turned out.
There are very few bigger "what ifs" in this game with regards to individual fighters and yet even after everything he went through, we’d say TJ Grant can still hold his head up high.
He had a great run in the world’s best MMA promotion and that’s something to be proud of.
