Every bad guy in the hotel had to be counting their lucky stars they weren’t on this elevator.
It wouldn’t have ended well for them. Not when Fabricio Werdum, Urijah Faber, CB Dollaway and a host of other current and former fighters, trainers and coaches were marooned together in a Cleveland elevator after it malfunctioned and got stuck on the way down Friday.
It happened soon after the fighters weighed in for Saturday’s UFC 203, an event in which pretty much all of the contents of the elevator will participate.
Justin Buchholz, who coaches at Faber’s Team Alpha Male gym in California, captured the wackiness and hilarity—it all qualifies as such because workers got everyone out in fairly short order—on video and a subsequent Instagram post (warning: NSFW language).
“We loaded up the elevator after weigh ins and it dropped with the door open!!!” Buchholz typed in the post. “Thank you God we only fell one floor and we were only trapped for like 10 [minutes] in the basement [because] we were running out of air.”
It seems far-fetched to claim they were actually running out of air, but assuming that was a joke, it still sounds like a pretty dicey situation.
Luckily, they had Werdum, the former UFC heavyweight champ and a consummate jokester who likes to repeatedly make this face whether anyone likes it or not, to keep everyone loose during the delay. Werdum can be heard joking that “somebody ate too much” after making weight. It’s a timely joke because of the aforementioned fact that everyone was returning from weigh-ins when it happened.
They then proceed to make snide remarks about each other’s weight until the hotel cavalry arrives.
Ah, MMA fighters. They’re just like us.
In all seriousness, good on the hotel employees for solving this elevator thing and getting everyone out unharmed. Who knows what the inside of that elevator would have looked like if they had gotten there after Werdum ran out of jokes.
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