Nate Diaz gives his own take on why he’s the “last of real” martial artists in MMA today.
Throughout the past year, Nate Diaz has shown more activity on social media than inside the UFC cage. If you follow him on Instagram, you likely saw this recent post.
This rather ambiguous yet very typical Nate Diaz post was brought up during Tuesday’s episode of the Ariel Helwani MMA Show on ESPN. When asked about what it meant, the man also responded in trademark fashion.
“People always talk sh-t, they’d be like, ‘Nate’s not winning this thing, he’s a .500 fighter, he’s a journeyman.’ They say sh-t like that about me. I’m like, ‘You guys are haters.’ For one, I was here before all of you even got here. I was here first. You guys all grew up on me. Straight up.
“For two, all this time, and all my records that you guys talk about, that I have a sh-t record. Guess what? You guys all got finished on your face. Choked out, knocked out, f—ked up all over the place. I’ll take a hundred of my losses before I take one of those losses. Straight up. So that’s what I mean when I talk about real martial artists.”
Forget about his TKO loss to Josh Thomson in 2013. In his mind, Diaz was never finished inside the Octagon.
“How come these guys are all getting finished? It’s a part of war,” he said. “The main objective in war is ‘go out there and come back home.’ And these guys all get finished off and it f—ng irritates me too. Conor McGregor just got finished, right?
“It’s a big fight, it’s a huge thing, he’s the best, he’s gonna get a rematch, he’s the f—ng GOAT and all this funny sh-t. Well, you just got finished off.
“When you get finished off like that, that doesn’t drop you down in the ranking system. It’s a control issue, too,” he added. “That doesn’t drop you down two spots in the rankings. You got choked out. You got knocked out. You just lost 15 spots.
“And then they still try to talk about me and my sh-t record, I’m like, ‘Ain’t no one finished me off. I’m still gonna be here until the end of time.’ I’m telling you, I’m hard to kill. Not like the rest of these guys.”
Diaz last saw action in November 2019 when he fought Jorge Masvidal for the inaugural Baddest Motherf—r title. He lost via third-round TKO due to a doctor stoppage.