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Former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight champion BJ Penn, who also held gold at 170 pounds, was in the news last week after video surfaced of “The Prodigy” getting into a “Big Island” bar fight, one that started with a parking lot knockout and ended with some Hawaiian ground and pound.
Watch those videos here and here.
Penn insists this latest mishap was not a case of drunken douchery. In fact, the former featherweight claims his assailant was an acquaintance who simply lost his cool and needed to be corralled. The means to that end? A Hawaiian hug in front of “a lot of witnesses” that went over like a lead balloon.
“I’m at a concert going to meet a friend of mine that I knew since we were real young kids and I’m over there, and then an acquaintance of mine, he gets mad about something,” Penn told TSN. “You know, something was said or what or if it was an old past thing and then he wants to fight about it. I’m like, ‘Naw naw,’ we’ve got a lot of witnesses, everybody can corroborate my story. I’m like, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to fight. We’re friends, everything’s cool,’ this and that.”
Working against Penn is the fact that he’s already been in trouble for street fighting in the past (sample here) and is currently embroiled in a custody battle from what his team is calling “hurtful and false” allegations of domestic violence against the mother of his children.
“He even walks outside and I’m thinking, ‘Aw, this is silly.’ I’m going to go get him, calm him down, come back inside, we’ll come enjoy the concert, we’ve got some other friends there,” Penn continued. “I walk outside to go give the guy a hug and then he hits me twice. I’m like, ‘No, no, calm down.’ I try to give him another hug and he hits me a couple more times and then he hits me again. I wish they didn’t cut the video in half so whoever put that video up cut it in half, I wish they had the whole thing that showed me trying to hug the guy.”
“Finally, my adrenaline kicked up because he was hitting me so much, I’m like, ‘Go ahead, hit me again.’ But really, I thought the guy would eventually just be like, ‘You know what? Forget it, B.J.,’ give me a hug or whatever, walk away,” Penn said. “He hit me and he hit me good. Knocked me down. And then when I got back up he tried it again and then I just had to defend myself. So that’s what you see in the second video.”
Penn is expected to make his Octagon return for the final fight of his UFC career against lightweight hater Nik Lentz. While the bout is targeted for November, the promotion has yet to make their grudge match official.
Stay tuned.