LOS ANGELES – To dispel a rumor making the rounds online Tuesday, Daniel Cormier’s shoe was not, in fact, put up for auction on eBay. A UFC PR representative returned the wayward footwear after Monday’s brawl in Las Vegas with Jon Jones.
DC did, however, need to go through some work to retrieve his cell phone.
“My cell phone went flying out of my pocket,” Cormier told MMAFighting.com in his VIP dressing room at Club Nokia before Tuesday’s UFC 178 fan question-and-answer session. “And when it was over, I couldn’t find it. What ended up happening was, my manager called the number, and he didn’t let on that it was my phone.
“He called, the fan who picked the phone up answered it, and my manager just said ‘this is an important phone and I need to have it back.’ The fan was cool, he returned it, so it all worked out.”
While Cormier came out of the impromptu slugfest with his possessions intact, Jones, who defends his UFC light heavyweight title against Cormier in the main event event on Sept. 27 in Las Vegas, wasn’t so lucky. He lost a pair of shades in the scuffle.
“I got my sunglasses back, but they were broken, man,” Jones said in his dressing room before the event. “They’re done. It’s a good thing I brought two pairs with me.”
The scuffle was still on everyone’s minds Tuesday, including those of the co-main eventers, Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier, who had just gone through their own intense square-off before the Jones-DC melee erupted.
For his part, Poirier said he kept one eye open in case of McGregor tried to do anything funny.
“When it happened, it took me a second to realize that this was something serious going on,” Poirier said. “Then I was kind of on the outside of the whole thing. Then finally, I went and looked to find a wall or something I could put my back up against, just in case Conor tried to start anything and or come up from behind. I’m not saying he would have, it’s just in those type of situations, you never know.”
McGregor, living up to the reputation of the fighting Irish, saw no real harm in the situation, though he placed the blame for the fracas on Cormier.
“I took a step back,” McGregor told MMAFighting.com. “In my head I was commentating on the situation. The fans were there, it was a great occasion. This the fight game, I don’t give a s–.You don’t grab a guy’s throat. It’s one thing head to head, whatever, but you grab a guy’s throat, it’s on. If someone had grabbed my throat, I would have broken his jaw.”
Of course, everyone could chuckle about the situation a day later because no one got hurt. But not everyone was happy with the situation. Among others, respected names like Matt Hughes and Brian Stann tweeted their disapproval of their incident, and neither Cormier nor Jones were about to debate the matter with them.
“It’s not for the good of the sport of MMA for us to be engaging in that kind of behavior,” Cormier said. “We’re still new, and the verdict isn’t out on us yet. People don’t necessarily know us outside of the cage, so it is very important for us to put our best foot forward every time, which it wasn’t yesterday.
On this, Jones and Cormier concurred.
“They have every right to be disappointed,” Jones said. “I need to look at it as a guy who, I look at that situation and, maybe I was wrong. I apologize for it. Some people are going to be entertained by it, but others found it distasteful and I apologize to them.”
At the end of the day, of course, Jones vs. Cormier which was going to be one of the bigger fights on the calendar, has exploded and turned UFC 173 into the biggest event of 2014, thanks to Monday’s brawl. And Cormier isn’t naive enough to act like the incident isn’t a boon for business.
“It’s crazy though,” Cormier said. “Even though what happened wasn’t acceptable, the fight is so much bigger than it was a couple days ago. We’ve had some big fights. Any time Georges St-Pierre fights, any time Anderson Silva fights, it’s a big deal. It’s on that level now. It was on Good Morning America. That doesn’t happen in MMA very often. Lorenzo called us and talked to us. He was pretty upset man, but I don’t know how upset he is going to be with the PPV numbers.”