“I haven’t really made it a big deal, but this will be my last fight,” Erosa told James Lynch of Fanatics View. “I just wanted to give myself one more opportunity to try to get my hand raised, but I wanted to make it a date of when I was going to be done, because I think the problem is win, lose or draw, I’m going to want to fight again.”
The logic is honest about how fighters think. “If I win the fight, all I want to do after I win a fight is do it again, because it’s like the best feeling, obviously, for us fighters, is to win a fight in the UFC,” he said. “So I think it’s actually harder if I win my fight for me to want to hang it up, because, ‘Why am I going to hang it up? I’m doing good. Let’s keep this going.’ But if I lose, all I’m going to want is redemption.” Setting the date in advance removes that choice from the moment it is hardest to make.
The reason behind it is family. Erosa’s wife moved back to Washington more than a year ago to help run his mother’s business, and the arrangement could not last with Erosa training in Las Vegas. “She was trying to run (my mother’s) stand, but we realized that if I’m here and she’s there, at the time we had a one-year-old kid, that’s not sustainable,” he said. The plan is already set: on November 18, Erosa, his wife and their son leave Las Vegas for Yakima, the city he grew up in and has always fought out of. He has also acknowledged that training is getting harder alongside younger athletes, and that he wants to leave with his health intact.
It is a notable shift from earlier this year. Ahead of his long-awaited first UFC fight in his home state, in Seattle in March, Erosa told MMA Junkie Radio he had just signed a new five-fight contract and did not expect that night to be his last, even though a home-state farewell was tempting. Instead, he chose to give himself one more fight and a clear finish line.
His career has always been defined by persistence and entertainment. Erosa went 10-0 as an amateur, turned pro in 2010, competed on The Ultimate Fighter 22 as part of Team Faber, and made his UFC debut in December 2015. He was released twice, earned a Contender Series appearance along the way, and returned in 2020 as a late replacement, staying on the roster ever since. He enters his final fight 9-9 in the UFC, with wins including a knockout of Nate Landwehr and a submission of Charles Jourdain, and a reputation as one of the division’s most reliably exciting fighters, with a total of 12 career wins by knockout and 14 by submission.
Lee, an 11-3 South Korean featherweight, has a losing streak of his own to end, which means neither man is walking into a send-off. Erosa has said he plans to lean more on wrestling and grappling against the cage rather than rely entirely on exchanges, a nod to the experience behind more than 40 professional fights. The card is headlined by Renato Moicano against Tom Nolan.
Whatever happens on Halloween night, the next chapter is already written. A move home, a family business, and a son who gets his father home full-time. Julian Erosa gets to choose his ending, which is more than most fighters are given.
