World Extreme Cagefighting featherweight champion José Aldo (18-1) was offered a fight with former UFC lightweight #1 contender Kenny Florian, a match Aldo readily agreed to but it wasn’t something his management wanted.
André Pederneiras, leader of the team in Rio de Janeiro, spoke to Tatame.com revealing that it was his decision to turn down Florian. Which in the end, turned out better for Aldo, as the announcement was made that both the WEC and UFC would unite. The featherweight champ will now make his UFC debut against Josh Grispi in the co-main event of UFC 125 on Jan. 1st for the first ever UFC featherweight title.
A counter-offer was made with a fight between Aldo and Kenny Florian. They offered us this and I was the first to decline it. Aldo fighting Ultimate’s champion, the fourth in the world, is one thing. It’s the champion of the event fighting a champion of the same organization, but on the weight division above. It’s the same thing that Ultimate confronts champions of two different divisions of the event. But the counter-proposal was not interesting…
When they said it’d be Kenny Florian, it’s not that he’s not a tough guy, I think he’s an excellent athlete, but he’s coming from a bad result and, unfortunately for him, he was never Ultimate’s champion, and now he’s not even on the top 10 pound by pound, so I couldn’t see why this fight should happen. Who turned the proposal down was me, and nobody else. Aldo wanted to fight, but who turned it down was me because I understand this fight wouldn’t bring any benefit to him, independently that Kenny Florian is a great fighter or not.
If they have offered Sean Sherk, on a similar situation, maybe I’d have accepted, it was more likely. He was a guy coming from a win and he once was the champion of the event, so we declined the offer because of that. It wasn’t because we were afraid of the other guy, it was because I thought I wasn’t worth it. Junior is a very young guy and he’ll get heavier naturally, we don’t need to force anything. On the following week, it turned out he was UFC’s champion on the division below, so it was even better.