(“Yeah, I’d like to see you do that three more ti-THWOMP!” Photo via Getty.)
It’s such a shame that TUF 14 winner Diego Brandao is going to be forced into retirement at just 26 years of age on account of his mental illness. What’s that? You hadn’t heard that Diego Brandao is suffering from a multitude of mental illnesses? Well maybe you should check out his recent interview with MMAFighting, in which he not only confirms that he threatened to “stab Dustin Poirier with a pen” (you hear a little girl, Ace?) backstage at the UFC 168 weigh-ins, but believes that Poirier was “scared” and “got lucky” in their fight the following night:
He was there, bouncing at the weigh-ins, staring at me. I told him backstage ‘if you ever do that again, I’ll stab you with a pen.’ That’s what happened.
Every time he saw me at the hotel he kept staring at me, and I responded asked what was the problem, if he looking like that because he was hungry or what. When he got inside the cage I saw he was scared. He got lucky (to win).
“Quite honestly,” Brandao added, “I’ve never seen a fighter get lucky so many times in a 30-second period. You’d think that at least some of the punches he threw at me would have missed, but nooooooo.”
I’m kidding, of course. There’s no way that Brandao has ever started a sentence with “quite honestly.” But I do find it funny that Brandao would attribute Poirier’s pre-fight ‘tude to hunger, when Brandao himself was clearly the angrier and fatter of the two.
Of course, there’s a chance that Brandao isn’t full-on Bynesing here. He could simply be suffering the aftereffects of not only his KO loss at UFC 168, but the car accident he was allegedly involved in just two weeks before the fight:
A drunk man hit my car, and I ended up crashing in another car. I had to go to my lawyer. (The other driver) didn’t want to pay the costs to fix my car. I did my best, I was a warrior just to step inside that cage. Any other fighter would just run away, but I needed that.
I couldn’t run, I couldn’t cut weight to fight. I had injuries in my back and ribs, but I went there and fought. I don’t think I trained more than five times for this fight and I knocked him down twice in the first round.
Something tells me that Brandao has to “go to his lawyer” a lot, with all the pen-stabbings he is probably involved in and all. If he takes offense to a guy he’s about to fight staring at him for too long, Lord knows how he treats some bum who eyeballs his girlfriend at the gas station.