The in-your-face history of the BMF belt, as told by the man who inspired it

The fifth BMF title fight in UFC history goes down Saturday at UFC 326 in Las Vegas, featuring -- as always -- two of MMA's most beloved figures. This time, it's Max Holloway and Charles Oliveira.

Officially, the BMF lineage dates back to UFC 241 in 2019, when Nate Diaz defeated Anthony Pettis and famously said he wanted Jorge Masvidal next for what he called the "baddest motherf---er in the game belt." UFC CEO Dana White later said that single moment was behind the promotion's decision to create a physical belt for Diaz vs. Masvidal at UFC 244.

Since then, the "BMF" title has been one of the UFC's savviest marketing plays, reserved for the promotion's most ferocious, exciting fighters: Diaz, Masvidal, Justin Gaethje, Dustin Poirier, Holloway and Oliveira.

The UFC stands as the BMF's official record keeper, but the true origin story belongs to Diaz. It's a story that began in Stockton, California, where every Diaz story starts. It was developed through his experiences in the fight game and blossomed into the unique honor it represents now to the MMA world. In Diaz's own words, it is "the moral code of the fight game."

This is the untold history of the BMF, according to the man who wrote it.

For Nate Diaz, the history of the BMF begins with the first BMF he ever knew -- his older brother, Nick.

Nate remembers Nick dating a girl in high school who started to draw attention from some of the popular varsity football players. Nick found out and responded by "whooping their ass."

"They thought they were the coolest kids in school because they played football," Nate told ESPN. "Nick was like, 'F--- football and f--- these fools.' He'd walk into a party and say, 'Who's the baddest motherf---er in the room? I am. What's up?' Everything I ever knew was always, 'Who's the baddest motherf---er in the room?' If some guys came in and thought it was them, it'd be on."

When Nick transitioned into fighting professionally at 18 years old, his mindset remained the same. And fans loved him for it.

Nick had a way of taking his simple challenge from house parties to sanctioned MMA, taunting and open-hand slapping opponents in the middle of fights. He won a championship in Strikeforce in 2010 and became one of the sport's biggest stars. He built his "Nick Diaz Army," which included teammates Gilbert Melendez and Jake Shields. At one point, all three held Strikeforce titles. Nate, who signed with the UFC in 2007, aimed to be just like them.

"I remember training with them and people would come to interview us as a team," Nate said. "All of them would have their belts because they're champions and I'm sitting there like, 'Damn, I'm the lamest one, I don't got no belt.' For years and years it was like that. They were getting these fat paychecks and I was like, 'Damn, I've got to do something.'"

The problem was Nate's path to a UFC lightweight championship looked different from that of his brother and teammates' title runs in Strikeforce. Namely, Nate had to go through many more wrestlers than strikers.

During his first nine appearances in the UFC, Nate collected six fight night bonuses but went 6-3 overall. His fights were entertaining, but the outcomes were mixed against opponents such as Clay Guida and Joe Stevenson with wrestling-heavy styles. In his professional career, Diaz's record is 4-10 when a fight goes the distance. "Point fighting" is not where he thrives, because from his perspective, it's not what a BMF does.

"Those guys would get a lead by wrestling, but they'd get tired by the third round and Nate would just be getting started, picking them apart," Melendez told ESPN. "Those types of fights, it doesn't feel like a loss. He'd say, 'I didn't lose that s---, I just ran out of time.' And he was right, he did just run out of time."

In 2012, Nate earned his one and only opportunity at a UFC title, and suffered a five-round decision loss to Benson Henderson, who recorded eight takedowns and controlled Nate on the canvas for more than half the fight. After that, Nate decided to change his entire approach to the fight game. No more chasing a UFC belt. No more trying to operate in a UFC ecosystem.

"I told myself, 'I ain't taking any more fights unless they're fighters,'" Diaz said. "Not just top guys. Fighters. The baddest motherf--ers. The ones who want to kill me. It's kill or be killed. I'm not losing no more decisions." The years immediately following Diaz's title loss were some of the most frustrating of his career.

His new mantra of only accepting opponents who met his criteria occasionally put him at odds with the UFC. If the promotion offered Diaz a matchup that didn't excite him or appeared to favor the opponent, he turned it down. As a result, he sat out nearly all of 2014 and 2015 and grew unhappy with his contract. In a 24-month stretch from Dec. 1, 2013, to Dec. 1, 2015, he only made one appearance -- and missed weight for the first and only time in his life.

"For whatever reason, the UFC never quite knew what they had in Nate," Shields told ESPN. "I don't know why. They were always offering him bad matchups. Maybe it was something personal with Dana? Nate was a guy who would not cave in to Dana, which is maybe why they clashed but also why the fans loved him."

The UFC declined to comment for this article.

It didn't help that the UFC was promoting another fighter in the way Diaz always felt he should have been: Conor McGregor. While Diaz sat frustrated with his options, McGregor rose to superstardom. He fought five times in 2014 and '15, capped by a 13-second knockout of José Aldo for the featherweight title in December 2015. Diaz felt the company treated him like a pawn in the lightweight division, while it crowned McGregor king.

"They were talking about this guy like he's the baddest motherf---er in the room," Nate said. "I was saying, 'I'll beat the f--- out of this guy.' All he did was beat up a smaller fighter. It was annoying because it was all in my face. ... When he started talking about moving up to lightweight, I was like, 'Cool, now I can beat his ass and it won't be me calling out a little guy.'"

A week after McGregor beat Aldo, Diaz won a unanimous decision against Michael Johnson, who entered the fight having won four of his past five. When Diaz got the microphone inside the Octagon after the win, he called out McGregor in one of the most infamous postfight interviews in history.

"Conor McGregor, you're taking everything I worked for, motherf---er," he said. "I'm gonna fight your f---ing ass. You know what's the real fight, what's the real money fight. It's me."

The BMF title wasn't born in that speech (that moment would come four years later) but the rules that govern the title were. Someone had walked into the same room as Diaz and acted like he was the baddest, and Diaz had done something about it. Diaz and McGregor would go on to split back-to-back fights in one of the greatest rivalries in UFC history. Neither of those bouts show up on the BMF ledger, but that's exactly what they were.

"I refuse to sit there and watch someone act like a bad motherf---er," Diaz said. "I'm like, 'Bro, back the f--- up.' It's the moral code of the fight game. Everybody understands it when they see it. They can make me sound crazy for saying it, but it's what fighting is all about."

From Diaz's perspective, once his rivalry with McGregor was over, the UFC went back to business as usual when it came to his career.

He had stepped up to fight McGregor on short notice in early 2016 and beat him by submission. McGregor was granted an immediate rematch -- even though Diaz felt McGregor didn't deserve one -- and Diaz lost a razor-thin decision. McGregor moved on to a lightweight title bout, while Diaz said he was asked to fight down the rankings once again.

"They called me and said, 'If you want this big fight or this big fight, you need to beat some guy who is ranked No. 20,'" Diaz recalled. "And I'm like, 'Oh, it's this s--- again.'"

In the UFC's defense, there weren't many options who could pique Diaz's interest. McGregor knocked out Eddie Alvarez to claim the lightweight championship in his next fight, then booked one of the most lucrative boxing matches ever against Floyd Mayweather Jr. Diaz wanted opportunities that felt just as big and unique, but they just weren't happening. He ended up sitting on the sideline for three years, waiting for the right fight to materialize.

"I was training the whole time, but nobody was impressing me, nobody was creating any hype,'" Diaz said. "There were some good fighters out there, but if you're a dork, I'm cool. Just like the star football player who tried to steal my brother's girl -- I want to beat his ass. I want to fight somebody cool and take all their cool points. Years went by and there was nothing to get me to jump and say, 'Yeah, I'll fight him.'

"And then finally, out of nowhere, Jorge Masvidal."

A self-made street fighter turned veteran contender, Masvidal scored the quickest knockout in UFC history when he landed a flying knee five seconds into his fight against wrestler Ben Askren at UFC 239 in July 2019. That moment encapsulated everything Diaz was looking for in an opponent. Masvidal had proven his grit from the backyards of Miami to the UFC Octagon, time and time again -- just as Diaz had. It was an absolutely perfect matchup. So perfect, Diaz couldn't believe the MMA world wasn't already calling for it.

"If I was watching or playing a video game, I'd be like, 'All right, who's Masvidal and who's Nate?' That's what I'd want to watch," Diaz said. "But people don't think, so you have to make them think. When Masvidal knocked that dude out, I was like, 'That is the fight. How do I get that fight?' Because the UFC wasn't just going to give it to me."

As it turned out, the answer was to book a fight against Pettis, who had just jumped into the welterweight rankings with an upset knockout over former title challenger Stephen Thompson. Diaz dominated Pettis and delivered the official BMF moment. He offered to defend his BMF belt against Masvidal, who happened to be sitting Octagonside that night. Less than four weeks later, Diaz vs. Masvidal was announced as the UFC's headliner for its annual New York card at Madison Square Garden.

"I didn't plan it," Diaz said, regarding the postfight interview that created the BMF. "It's not like I was running miles, planning this s---. I was just saying, 'I'm the baddest motherf---er, but some of you think he's the baddest motherf---er, so what's poppin'?' It just came out that I said I wanted to defend it. But that's a bad motherf---ing move, too, if you ask me, because guess what? You get to fight me for my belt. You want to be the dopest motherf---er here? That goes through me."

Without planning it, Diaz had created what would turn into one of the biggest spectacles in UFC history -- and it had nothing to do with rankings, divisional hierarchy or UFC matchmaking. It came from the same code he'd adopted from his brother as a kid.

The inaugural BMF title fight on Nov. 2, 2019, drew more than 20,000 and generated a live gate of $6.5 million. It was the UFC's highest-grossing gate that year.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson entered the arena that night with the BMF title. Donald Trump was in attendance, marking the first appearance by a sitting U.S. president at a UFC event. On that same night in Las Vegas, boxing superstar Canelo Alvarez's walkout was reportedly delayed until the BMF title fight ended. The UFC main event was streamed on the jumbotron for fans waiting on Canelo vs. Sergey Kovalev at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, in a sign that even one of the most established, legitimate champions in combat sports didn't want to compete for viewers' attention against Diaz's nontitle appearance.

"I remember that Canelo had to hold his walk," said Melendez, who was in Diaz's corner that night. "That's what Nate made happen. F---, he's a winner for that. That's amazing to me. That's how big it was. Canelo held his walk until we were done that night." Diaz lost to Masvidal due to a doctor's stoppage after the third round that he contests to this day, but the BMF concept he introduced to the MMA world has continued to stand the test of time. The belt has its critics, who say it's become an outdated, meaningless marketing tool. And yet, actual, undisputed champions have asked to fight for it. Holloway, one of the greatest featherweights of all time, acknowledged that his BMF title reign has translated into one of the biggest financial windfalls of his career.

"We can't really talk about contracts too much, but you can see right away my face changes," Holloway told ESPN. "A lot of guys have a lot of things to say about this belt, but I've had the undisputed title, interim title and the BMF -- and let's just say it's been very nice [financially]."

What place the BMF title holds in the sport moving forward, that's still up to the UFC. It was dormant for nearly four years after UFC 244. And had Poirier taken the belt from Holloway in Poirier's retirement fight last summer in New Orleans, who knows what would have become of it?

For Diaz, the belt's lasting power is a source of pride -- and validation of his belief in that moral code of the fight game. As he said on the night he first invoked the BMF, Diaz still believes the best fighter in the game is not "who [the UFC] says it is; it's who I say it is." And in true BMF fashion, Diaz, 40, who left the UFC in 2022 to pursue other options, said he might just have to go back to the Octagon at some point to show them all, again, what's up.

"I still never got that [championship] belt like all of my teammates, and I still never felt like I quite finished the mission," Diaz said. "This is my life and I stand on it forever. I never thought about it like that but that's a bad motherf---ing move right there. Why would I ever stop? Maybe it's my job to go back in there and show these motherf---ers where this all came from."