ONE Championship’s Christian Lee vows to finish Eddie Alvarez when they finally meet

ONE Championship lightweight king Christian Lee has been using his time out of the cage wisely, making use of his family’s United MMA gym in Hawaii and thanking his lucky stars he has two tailor-made training partners in sister and ONE atomweight champ Angela Lee, and her husband and bantamweight Bruno Pucci.

Like everyone, the coronavirus crisis has left the 21-year-old with an overabundance of time to think. But even then, Lee (13-3) seems to be using this to his advantage as he has been going over a fight – and a fighter – looming on his horizon.

“Ever since Eddie Alvarez got signed by ONE, he’s been on my mind constantly,” Lee told the Post. “I’m hopeful he will have one more good fight, one or two more good wins and then they give him a title shot. They’ll be dying to give him that shot and it will be a good way to prove the skill and calibre of ONE Championship compared to a [former] UFC champion. So I need to put on a show when that happens.”

There was a general sense among the international punditry that ONE’s lightweight division would be there for Alvarez’s taking after he signed on in October 2018.

It took about four minutes and a crisp combination to throw that concept out the window, as Russian Timofey Nastyukhin (13-4) ruined the “The Underground King’s” coming out party at ONE: A New Era in Tokyo in March with a first-round TKO. Alvarez (30-7, one no contest) went back to the gym to sort himself out and would have watched on from the US as Lee used the rest of 2019 to make the division his own.