Georges St-Pierre unveiled another side of the failed booking of a would-be superfight with Khabib Nurmagomedov.
Georges St-Pierre vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov will go down in history as one of the biggest super-fights that never took place. And over the years, both sides have come up with explanations as to why nothing ever materialized.
Recently, the 40-year-old St-Pierre sat down with Patrick Bet-David and was once again asked about the would-be matchup with “The Eagle.” Now, GSP went into detail about his dealings with Dana White and how the UFC president reached out to him after both he and Khabib had already hung up their gloves.
“What happened now — because Khabib is retired and I’m retired — so now, the UFC… Dana called me and he’s like, ‘Oh, now would you be interested to fight Khabib?’ He asked me. He called me.
“But I thought it was strange because I never wanted to do it. And now, because he called me for that reason, I was like… I didn’t want to do it, but I told Dana, just to see what happens because I was curious. You know it’s always a chess game when the promoter calls you.
“I didn’t say no, I said, ‘OK. Let me think about it.’ The way Dana talked to me, it was like Khabib already accepted. But it wasn’t true. It was just fishing to make the fight happen.
“They knew now that we were both retired, so now, for them, it was an opportunity to make a big-money fight.”
A few days after his conversation with the UFC, Khabib’s manager Ali Abdelaziz told Mike Tyson that St-Pierre asked for a fight at 165 pounds.
“So I said I’m gonna think about it and I wait a few days and I saw in the media that Ali Abdelaziz came out publicly and said ‘Hey, now Georges wants to fight, but now we already retired…’ It was all BS.
“Dana kind of lied to me. They didn’t approach Khabib first, they approached me first to make it happen. I know now for a fact (that Dana lied to me). A hundred percent.”
There was also a point in time when St-Pierre was being set up to fight boxing legend, Oscar De La Hoya, in an exhibition match. The UFC, however, stepped in and pulled the plug on it from the get-go, costing St-Pierre a massive payday.
For the two-division UFC champion, it’s all part of the organization’s grand strategy.
“Dana, now, could’ve gotten back to the media and said, ‘Oh, why would I let Georges go fight in boxing when he doesn’t want to fight Khabib with the UFC?’ So he would’ve had a good reason.
“That’s why he did this. It was a strategic move on his part. It’s always like this with Dana.”
In the same interview, St-Pierre once again rejected the idea of taking on the 33-year-old Khabib inside the cage regardless of the deal because ‘there is no price’ for his health. However, he did express his willingness to compete in a grappling match with Nurmagomedov.