Stephen Thompson Makes His Final Walk at the Garden Where He Nearly Won It All

Stephen Thompson has made a career out of being introduced as a legend, and on Saturday he stops having to hear it in the future tense. The 43-year-old “Wonderboy” fights for the last time at UFC 334, against Charles Radtke in the featured prelim at Madison Square Garden — and he made the final weigh-in of his career on Friday, hitting 170.6 pounds to Radtke's 170.8.

Thompson confirmed the decision on November 5, and he didn't dress it up. “It's my last one, brother,” he told journalist James Lynch. “And what better place to have it than Madison Square Garden, New York City?” It will be his fourth appearance at the Garden, in a 14-year UFC career that began in 2012.

The numbers he's closing with are 17-9-1 as a professional and 12-9-1 in the UFC — and for a decade those numbers understated him, because Thompson's karate-based striking made him the puzzle every welterweight contender had to solve. He beat Robert Whittaker, Rory MacDonald, Johny Hendricks, Jorge Masvidal and Vicente Luque, and twice fought Tyron Woodley for the title: a majority draw at UFC 205 in this same building in 2016, then a majority-decision loss in the rematch. The belt is the one line missing from the record, and he has made his peace with the missing line.

“I don't see the title anymore,” Thompson said this week. “These guys are just young studs coming up. I'm not trying to get hurt.” His last win came in December 2022, a fourth-round TKO of Kevin Holland; since then he's been submitted by Shavkat Rakhmonov, knocked out by Joaquin Buckley and edged by Gabriel Bonfim on a split decision in July 2025 — a three-fight skid that reads less like a collapse than like a division's next generation arriving on schedule.

The other reason arrived five months ago. Thompson recently became a father to a baby girl, and he has said plainly that fatherhood changed the calculation — the recovery burden at 43, the damage arithmetic against younger men, weighed against a daughter who just turned five months old. He'll keep teaching martial arts. He has left the door open to competition like Real American Freestyle wrestling, without anything booked. What he's closing is MMA.

Across from him, Radtke carries the unglamorous side of the assignment. The 12-5 welterweight has settled into a gatekeeper's role, and on Saturday the gate is a farewell: beat a legend in his retirement fight at the Garden and own the footnote forever, or become the answer to a trivia question about who Thompson beat last. Spoiling a send-off is a real career line too — it's just not the one the crowd is paying to see.

The farewell fight is a strange UFC genre — the promotion rarely schedules them kindly, and Thompson, a slight favorite, isn't getting a ceremonial opponent. But the setting does the honoring on its own. UFC 205 at the Garden is where he fought Woodley to that draw in one of the era's great welterweight title fights; nine years later he walks into the same arena to close the book, on a card headlined by two title fights, in the featured prelim slot.

“I've had no regrets, and if I've lost a fight, it's on me,” Thompson said this week. Fourteen years, two title fights, one of the most copied striking styles in the sport — and an exit chosen at 43, on his feet, in the building where he came closest. Fighters almost never get to pick all three of those. Wonderboy did.

The Garden thread in his career runs deeper than one title fight. A year after the Woodley draw, Thompson came back to the same building and beat Jorge Masvidal there — one of the signature wins of his run — and Saturday makes four appearances at the arena across a career that has outlasted most of the division he debuted into. He prepared for this one, by his own account, leaving no stone unturned, precisely because it's the last: no regrets was the standard he set for the camp, not just the career.

He is, by a matter of months, the oldest fighter on the card — older even than Jim Miller, who makes his record-setting 48th trip to the Octagon on the same prelims. Two 43-year-olds closing out legendary careers on one undercard is its own piece of UFC history, and the Garden crowd gets both farewells in the same hour.