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With Colby Covington now confirmed to get next Welterweight title shot against division kingpin, Kamaru Usman, fight fans can now look forward to several months of embarrassing “trash talk.” While no date or location has been made official at this time, it seems as though the 170-pound showdown will likely take place at either UFC 244 at Madison Square Garden in New York, N.Y., on Nov. 2, 2019, or at UFC 245 in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Dec. 14, 2019.
And, unsurprisingly, it seems as though the Donald Trump-adoring Covington has been super successful in polarizing the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fan base with his unapologetic rhetoric. Perhaps much too far, according to “Nigerian Nightmare.”
“I’ve been deleting messages for the past two days from Instagram,” Usman told TMZ (transcription via MMAJunkie). “I’ve just deleted, deleted, deleted messages – thousands of messages on Instagram – of people saying: ‘Bro, you’ve gotta kill this dude.’ It’s not ‘beat him,’ it’s ‘kill this guy,’ ‘kill him for us,’ ‘I want him done worse than Askren was.’ People have malicious intent for this guy, myself included.
“I’m just blessed to be able to go out there and do it,” Usman concluded.
The beef between Usman and Covington has been brewing, at least publicly, since a tense backstage altercation at UFC 223 back in April 2018 (watch it). “Chaos” erupted again months later at a casino buffet (watch it), just hours after Usman took the title off Tyron Woodley at UFC 235 earlier this year.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t boil over into something way more serious between now and showtime.