Filed under: UFC
The UFC has a basic formula for promoting its fights that invariably includes one fighter looking into the camera and vowing to defeat his upcoming opponent. Everyone who follows the UFC has seen it many times.
But this week some spice was added to that formula when B.J. Penn accused the UFC of going overboard in pressuring him to trash talk his upcoming opponent, Nick Diaz — and the UFC responded by releasing footage of its promotional interview with Penn that indicated he hadn’t really been pressured at all.
A video that Penn posted on his official YouTube account, discussing the way the UFC wanted him to hype the fight with Diaz, is above. The UFC’s raw footage of its promotional interview with Penn is after the jump.
“They forced me to say, at the end of the whole thing, they forced me,” Penn said of the way the UFC wanted him to directly address Diaz. “‘You gotta say Nick Diaz’s name now, you gotta say his name.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ They were like, ‘Say you’re gonna beat Nick Diaz. Say you’re going to beat Nick Diaz.’ And I said, ‘I’m going to beat Nick Diaz.'”
In response to that, UFC President Dana White supplied the uncut footage of Penn’s interview with the UFC’s promotional team directly to MixedMartialArts.com. The full, unedited Penn interview doesn’t seem to show the UFC really putting any pressure on Penn to say anything other than Diaz’s name and the date of the fight.
And ultimately, all Penn said in the interview is what every fighter says: He’s predicting that he’s going to win. Nothing too surprising there.