Dan Hooker

Dan 'The Hangman' Hooker is a long-tenured New Zealand lightweight who trains out of City Kickboxing in Auckland and has shared the cage with nearly every top-ten name in the division over the last decade. A come-forward striker with a reputation for absorbing and dishing out damage in equal measure, he has spent his career fighting main-event-caliber opposition regardless of the stakes. He enters Paris on back-to-back stoppage losses to Arman Tsarukyan and Benoit Saint Denis and needs a statement win to stay in the contender conversation. At 36, headlining in France against a hyped debutant is exactly the kind of high-visibility spot he has built a career on.