Longtime UFC bantamweight champ Dominick Cruz will once again defend his throne when he takes on rising star Cody ‘No Love’ Garbrandt in the co-main event of UFC 207.
Cruz and Garbrandt have been heavily exchanging words with one another through social media, and also partook in quite the verbal exchange during the UFC Sacramento event earlier this month, in which the FOX production truck had to hit the bleep button a few more times than they would have cared to. Cruz recently spoke to FOX Sports to discuss his issues with ‘No Love’, claiming that the Team Alpha Male product is simply looking to get as much attention as he can:
“There are cameras around and he knows it. It’s not hard to find me. That’s what you’ve got to understand. All this ‘we bumped into each other’ stuff is not we bumped into each other. It’s he goes and looks for me and finds me because he wants camera time,” Cruz said. “This guy loves the limelight. He loves attention. Look at him, he’s just begging for attention in everything he does. He wants attention, attention, attention.
“So he finds me because I’m the champion and I’m the guy who he wants to fight and I’m the guy that can get him the most attention in the division and he knows where I’m going to be at. Why? Because I’m doing my job. I’m working. I’m doing something he doesn’t do. I’m doing more than just talk. I’m following through with action. I’m doing my job and it’s easy to find me. All you’ve got to do is find where FOX is at. He goes and he looks for me and he goes and makes a bunch of loud noises and screams and yells and tries to look as tough as he can and that’s how he’s gotten in this position. Well I see right through that. He just wants attention. It’s nothing more than that.”
Besides the title, Cruz feels that Garbrandts biggest motivation for calling him out to throw-down is because it’s the best way to get the attention and paycheck he seeks:
“He wants to fight me because I’m the ticket to the most attention he can get. I’m the ticket to how he gets paid the best, according to the division obviously so that’s what he wants,” Cruz said. “He’s too immature and too dumb to understand that part of things. It’s just him, him, him, ‘I need attention, I need to look cool, I need to look tough’ and that’s the end of it.
“It’s all a big facade. Really that’s what it comes down to. He finds me and makes a bunch of loud noises around me and that’s how he got put into this position. It’s really common sense if you think about it. If you think about it, there’s no reason for me to go looking for a guy that’s No. 6 of the bantamweights. He talked himself into this. He asked for this ass whooping I’m going to give him and so that’s what I’m going to do.”
Cruz says that the moment Garbrandt rubbed him the wrong way was immediately after the conclusion of his bout with Urijah Faber at UFC 199, where Garbrandt immediately began firing off verbal shots at ‘The Dominator’ by telling him to ‘get his belt ready’:
“I literally got done beating up Faber and was walking back to do my interviews with FOX, well it’s pretty easy to find me back there obviously. You know I’m coming from the cage, you just run over to where I’m at and you just start talking, but he kind of made it all about him right away,” Cruz said.
“He gave no respect. It was just ‘hey I’m here, you better get my belt ready’ and this and that. I get that he’s trying to promote and I get that he’s mad that I beat up his coach but it just shows how immature and how much he just needs to take a beating and how badly I need to beat him up. I literally got done with a fight and he was already trying to fight me again. It just showed what a wuss he is to me. It just showed how weak he is to me. I want to prove that. Right off the bat it got me watering at the mouth to put a beating on him because I think he’s an idiot.”
The 135-pound champ claims that this isn’t the first time he’s fought a style of opponent similar to Garbrandt, as he believes Brian Bowles, who he fought back in the WEC in 2010, is cut from the same cloth as ‘No Love’:
“What’s the difference between Cody Garbrandt and the man who I took my WEC title from in 2010, Brian Bowles? What’s the difference in style between those two gentlemen? Not much. I’ll help you out. There’s not much of a difference,” Cruz said. “The only difference is Bowles might have a little bit better guillotine (choke) than Garbrandt.
“I know everything about this guy’s game. I can dissect every single movement he does and why he does it and I understand it. He cannot do that with me. Again, that makes this a very tough style for him and he knows that. So the biggest thing he can do is scream and yell and look as scary and tough as he thinks he can for his fans so they can get behind him and he can get more attention put on him. Because Cody ‘No Love’ is nothing more than an attention whore.”
While Garbrandt has shown some of the most vicious power the bantamweight division has seen in some time, do you think it will be enough to de-throne Cruz’s longtime reign on top?
Cruz and Garbrandt will meet in the co-main event of UFC 207 live on pay-per-view (PPV) for the bantamweight title, from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on December 30, 2016.
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