Watch the sparring clip that Garbrandt and Dillashaw have argued about for several months.
To say that the UFC 217 title bout between former teammates Cody Garbrandt and T.J. Dillashaw is personal, is a bit of an understatement. There were a lot of talk about Dillashaw going too hard on sparring (which he admitted), to him throwing cheap shots and even taking PEDs (which he vehemently denied), all of which was part of a pretty ugly and very public falling out with Team Alpha Male.
One of the things the former training partners have discussed was their sparring sessions in the gym. Dillashaw had said that he made Garbrandt ‘cry’ and ‘quit’ in training numerous times, while Cody says he knocked him out back when he was 1-0 and just starting his career.
For about a year or so, the two argued about this, with the Team Alpha Male product teasing that he had video footage to prove this.
Ahead of this weekend’s bout, Garbrandt decided to release the much spoken about sparring clip.
The problem is that the quality isn’t very good as it looks like Cody (or someone else) took a video of the sparring clip from another screen, which distorted the already low quality footage further.
While the movement seems to look like it was indeed Dillashaw getting dropped by a right hand counter, the clip’s quality is so bad that it isn’t obvious who the two men are, or if the fighter was indeed “knocked out” and “looking at the ceiling” as they claim.
In the past, Dillashaw claimed he was never knocked out in both training or in the gym, with the closest being the TKO loss to John Dodson where he felt he was just “clipped.”
Things that happen in practice aren’t exactly good measures of what happens in an actual fight, and they’re usually best left away from the public eyes. But with things going beyond personal between these two, this just adds yet another chapter in their longstanding feud that should come to a head this Saturday.