"New Mansa" Out: Joaquin Buckley Says His Next UFC Fight Will Be His Last

"One more. Then I'm done."

Joaquin Buckley said it plainly on Thursday: his next walk to the UFC octagon will be his last. Five days after Mike Malott folded him with a brutal second-round knee in the main event of UFC Fight Night 291 in Edmonton, the 32-year-old welterweight — 21-9 as a professional, 11-7 inside the UFC — announced on Instagram that a single farewell fight is all he has left to give the sport.

The decision did not come from his coaches, his management, or the UFC matchmakers. It came from a phone call with his grandmother.

"That fight right there, it was devastating, and it really affected my family — the people that's closest to me," Buckley said in an emotional video posted to Instagram. "Listening to my grandmother speak and listening to her pray for me over the phone, and really being upset, and her telling me to retire and really kind of get away from fighting and get away from the sport because your mind is your biggest tool and your biggest asset, and you don't want to lose it."

He slept on it. He prayed on it. And he decided she was right — with one condition.

"It took a lot for me to listen and digest it, but I took some time, I slept on it, and I prayed about it, and I realized that my grandmother is right," Buckley said. "But, with that being said, I just told her to pray for me, and allow me to grace that octagon just one more time, and have the strength to step out there one more time, because I can't leave on a loss."

The announcement is a stunning reversal. In the immediate aftermath of the Malott knockout, Buckley had insisted he was going nowhere. "I'm not going to stop, I'm going to keep moving forward," he said that night in Edmonton. "I'm going to show you guys the team that I'm with, the team that I'm building and the thing I want to do. Because at the end of the day, man, I'm a fighter that fights."

His grandmother changed his mind.

In a separate appearance on his Kick stream, filmed in a sauna, Buckley laid out the cold arithmetic behind the decision. "My main goal was to always be a world champion. And I feel like I'm so far away from that goal that it just doesn't make any sense to keep moving forward," he said. "The risk and reward don't match. I think I did great with my career. I ain't got much left to give, y'all."

In the caption accompanying his Instagram video, Buckley wrote that he was doing it for his longevity and for his children — "my Lightskin twin and my Lil Crust" — "so I can still be here, present, and whole for the people who actually matter." He closed the post with a verse from Psalm 21:6: "Surely you have granted him unending blessings and made him glad with the joy of your presence."

No opponent, date, or venue has been named for the farewell bout. But Buckley promised the final camp of his career would look nothing like the ones that came before it. "We're going to do it right this time. We're not cutting any corners, no shortcuts, and we're going to do the difficult things," he said. "As I said, this is the last one, but we're going to make our last one the best one."

It is a remarkable turn for a fighter who, less than two years ago, looked like a future title challenger. Buckley joined the UFC in 2020 as a middleweight and announced himself to the world that October with one of the most spectacular knockouts in the sport's history — a jumping spinning back kick that flattened Impa Kasanganay on Fight Island, a finish still replayed every time the conversation turns to the greatest knockouts ever filmed.

After dropping to welterweight, Buckley ripped off six straight wins across 2023 and 2024, four of them by stoppage. The run peaked in December 2024, when he dismantled former interim champion Colby Covington in the UFC Tampa main event, forcing a third-round doctor's stoppage and planting himself firmly in the division's elite.

Then came the skid. Former champion Kamaru Usman outpointed him. Sean Brady dominated him at UFC 328 in Newark in May. And last weekend in Edmonton, Malott's knee ended his night — and, as it turned out, the second act of his career — in the second round. Three straight losses, each more punishing than the last, for a fighter whose all-action style has always demanded he give more of himself than the sport gives back.

"With me already having 18 fights in the organization, in six years, I'm a workhorse," Buckley said. "I gotta save myself from any more damage."

The timing makes this a week of farewells in the UFC — but Buckley's announcement stands entirely apart from Julian Erosa's retirement news. Different fighter, different story: one driven not by a long goodbye but by a grandmother's tears, a devastating knockout, and a 32-year-old in his athletic prime deciding that walking away whole matters more than chasing a title that keeps drifting further away.

One more. Then he's done. And if Buckley has his way, the last one will be the best one.