Gee… It was just recently we learned of Anderson Silva‘s disapproval over his manager, Ed Soares publicly dismissing Chael Sonnen as a deserving title-challenger. Soares said, Silva should be fighting other contenders, since Sonnen has already tapped on him once and tested positive for steroids. Soares also added Silva only has about 4 fights left in his career. Silva remarked on Soares to Brazilian Televison show, Tela Nitida by saying:
“His position was not good, was not cool, as a manager he needed to have a more professional attitude. He was not professional and I don’t know why… I think it was not cool. But everyone knows what’s best, he is a grown man and he is going to deal with the backlash of what he did.”
Silva then offered a thinly veiled threat to Soares regarding contractual obligations:
“First thing is that nobody can talk for me except myself. Second is that I don’t have a contract with anybody, except with Nine9 and my sponsors, so anything can happen.”
Yet despite the fact that one very high profile top MMA fighter boldly denounced his manager speaking out on his behalf, Cesar Gracie, the longtime manager and coach for Nick Diaz decided to throw some insults toward Georges St. Pierre and call him “little star guy”. Gracie told Sherdog:
“You can’t pull a guy off a card and then bring him back on: ‘Oh, he’s not good enough to fight. We pulled him out of the card. He can’t be in the main event. Yeah, here you go. Oh, wait a minute, guess what happened? Our little star guy over here, his knee hurts. Oh my God, we need Nick Diaz. Let’s put him back in the main event.’ Everybody wants to see that fight. He delivers. Well, little star guy didn’t fight and Nick Diaz did, but they pulled a lot of money from Nick’s purse because it wasn’t structured for him to make as much if it wasn’t GSP, even though he was the main event now and put the people in the seats. Nick Diaz saved that card. OK? That’s what people need to remember when they talk about responsibility, is that he showed up, hamstring injury, knee injury, whatever. He had the same thing. He’s the guy that showed up. He’s the guy that fought his heart out, him and B.J. Penn. They put on a show. They’re two great warriors. They saved the UFC that night.”
But it wasn’t too long ago, when Gracie spoke a different tune out of frustration when Diaz was a no-show to the Las Vegas UFC 137 pre-fight press conference which resulted in Diaz being pulled from the title-fight. Gracie told MMAFighting.com:
There’s a lot of hard workers I see that have trouble putting food on the table for their kids,. I’ve stuck up for Nick a lot, but I can’t stick up for him on this one. I would have driven him to Vegas if it came to that. I don’t care. He just turned his phone off and acted like a little kid. It just doesn’t cut it.”
Hey for that statement, you can’t blame Gracie for speaking out of heartfelt discouragement at the time. Is it okay then for Gracie to do an about-turn by taking all blame off Nick for problems that occurred with the UFC 137 card after-the-fact and call Nick the savior? If your intentions are in the right place, it’s only right to stick up for your guy. But let’s hope as Nick Diaz’s star is rising that Gracie stays grounded.
No fighter needs all the controversy within their own entourage when they only have few years to make their money and their mark. Besides, last I checked Diaz and Silva do pretty well when speaking for themselves, Nick earned himself a title-shot and Anderson pocketed some sweet Twitter cash. So let’s cross our fingers for Gracie’s sake, he doesn’t lose sight of how he was initially disappointed in Nick. Let’s put some faith in him, he isn’t caught smiling with GSP anytime soon [see picture of Soares and Sonnen above]. Let’s believe he’s in a more committed relationship with Diaz than that of Soares and Silva. And then, let’s really get down on our knees and pray for our sake, the managers stick to business behind-the-scenes, and we get to hear more from the fighters.
Source: Fighters Only