Things between the two fighters got heated, all with Chael Sonnen’s mother in the middle.
Chael Sonnen is no stranger to surprise altercations. Wanderlei Silva called him out for his borderline racist attacks on Brazil during a shuttle to a UFC event. Later on he’d try to sucker punch Chael on The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil. Now the same sort of thing is happening again, but this time with another legendary light heavyweight fighter: Chuck Liddell.
Sonnen has been trash talking Liddell for the past several months since a fight between the two started to seem like a possibility in Bellator. One of his greatest hits over that time? That Liddell was broke and “snorted all his money away.”
“I come into the dressing room and there was Chuck, face to face, and it was awkward,” Sonnen told MMA Fighting during a media scrum. “And I was doing [The Rich Eisen Show] and Eisen told me, ‘You got a message for Chuck? He’ll be here tomorrow.’ So I gave him a message to Chuck, thinking he would be there tomorrow.”
”Turned out Chuck was in the back, watching it on a monitor, with my mother. So, my mom and uncle had to get involved and it was just a big, colossal mess. I had to go one way and Chuck had to go the other, and it was weird.”
The two ended up in a heated shouting match, but Sonnen doesn’t think it will escalate into a real fight … not one that the two will get paid for, anyway.
”I don’t think he’s going to fight again,” Sonnen said. “I didn’t ask him point-blank because we were too busy yelling at one another, but he looked good, I’ll give him that. I mean, it looked like he was in shape, but I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s going to do. I’m up for [the fight] right now. I’m ready to go. I was ready to fight him yesterday in the green room, would’ve reached right over my mother.”
Just one day before, Liddell had told MMA Fighting that Sonnen’s jabs weren’t getting to him.
“He takes a lot of liberty with facts,” Chuck said. “He doesn’t need his facts to be true — he just makes them up as he goes. It’s hard to get mad at someone who everything he’s saying is made up.”
“If it was something where he really pissed me off and I wanted to fight him, I’d show up to his house. We don’t need the money, I’ll show up to his house. We’ll find out real quick.”
I wonder if showing up at The Rich Eisen Show qualifies.