For three rounds, Borislav Nikolić looked like a fighter trying to solve a problem the hard way. By the fourth, he had turned the championship fight into something else entirely: a late, violent reminder that momentum in MMA can change in a single breath, even after the scorecards seem to be drifting the wrong way.
At Hala Tivoli on 7 June 2025, Nikolić won the BRAVE CF Bantamweight world title by submitting Nicholas Hwende with a ninja choke at 1:42 of the fourth round. The finish mattered not only because it ended the fight, but because it rewrote it. Nikolić had trailed for three rounds and was fighting with his right eye swollen shut, yet still found the opening that gave him the belt.
A comeback built on patience and pressure
The result fits the broader shape of Nikolić’s career. He is 33 years old, born on 29 January 1993, and his professional record now stands at 16-2. That record has not been built in a straight line. He lost his first two professional fights, then put together a six-fight win streak, and that stretch tells you almost everything about his evolution: he has not always been the smoothest finisher, but he has become a remarkably difficult man to keep down.
His path into the cage also helps explain the way he fights. Before focusing on combat sports, Nikolić played soccer for eleven years. He then spent two years training at Titan Fight Team in Vršac without taking a fight, building an amateur record of 10-0 before turning professional. After university took him to Belgrade, he moved to MMA Tim CDS, then to the Renzo Gracie Secutor academy, and later back to CDS in Novi Sad. That long, circuitous route is the backdrop to a title win that required both durability and composure.
What the title fight said about Nikolić
There was also a reminder here that Nikolić is not just a fighter but a beekeeper with 120 beehives, which feels oddly fitting for someone whose best work often comes through persistence rather than flash. He can absorb pressure, keep working, and then suddenly make the whole fight tilt in his favor.
That was especially important against Hwende, because the build-up to the title fight was reported to be bad-tempered. Once the cage door closed, though, the argument was settled by timing. Nikolić did not need to dominate every exchange. He needed one clean sequence, and the ninja choke gave him exactly that at 1:42 of round four.
The title change also gives extra weight to what came before it. Nikolić had already answered one major setback by returning in September 2023 and knocking out Ali Guliev in ninety-four seconds after earlier losses to Brad Katona by guillotine at BRAVE CF 50 on 1 April 2021 and to Gamzat Magomedov by unanimous decision on 6 August 2022. That history matters because it shows the title win was not an isolated surge. It was the end point of a fighter who kept adjusting until the results changed.
At BRAVE CF, that is the kind of championship story that sticks. Nikolić did not win because everything went perfectly. He won because, even with the fight slipping away, he found a way to make it his. And in a division where margins are thin, that may be the most valuable skill of all.
