Esther Lin, MMA Fighting
Jorge Masvidal and Nate Diaz threw down on Saturday night in New York City to determine who was the baddest motherf**ker in the UFC, and the results were … slightly inconclusive. Jorge Masvidal was clearly winning the fight coming into the fourth round (we had all three rounds going his way in our play-by-play) but a nasty cut above Nate Diaz’s eye forced a doctor’s stoppage, handing Masvidal the win via TKO.
This was obviously a controversial move as far as many fans were concerned. We’ve seen worse in MMA, and the general consensus was if this fight had been held in Las Vegas we’d have gotten at least another round. At the top of the list of unhappy people regarding the outcome was Nate Diaz himself, who believes the loss began to unfold months ago when the UFC booked him shortly after his win against Anthony Pettis in August.
”I just feel like I had a non-stop fight camp,” Diaz said at the post-fight press conference. “I think I could have used a little more time. My eye was already shit from my last fight. And anyways, you sneeze on me and I bleed. Blood don’t hurt, just in case anybody doesn’t know. It’s just there. It’s f**ked up.”
”I knew they wanted to throw me right back in, also. Why couldn’t it, after the Pettis fight, be six months?” he asked. “They want me under the most f**ked up circumstances, or I’m going in under the most f**ked up circumstances. A little more time would have been nice. And I think that I heard my eye was the same coming out for the second round as the third round. The doctor played me, he was like ‘Aw man I dunno.’ Nah, I’m good. He asks me ‘You good? You can see out of that? Yeah, cool.’ And then he goes to the other guy and is like ‘Fights off.’ I’m like what the f**k.”
A short turnaround wasn’t the only issue Nate had coming in.
”I had a knee injury about three weeks ago and it kept me from running,” Diaz explained. “And that’s why I tell all my boys all the time if you’re gonna be fighting people you have to run and you have to run hard. And you have to do rounds, you have to spar and you have to run, that’s key, you know. So I didn’t have that, I don’t feel like I had that, that confidence that I usually had in my cardio as far as going and pushing. I knew I could make it five rounds for sure no matter what but I couldn’t keep the pressure. I didn’t have the confidence to keep the pressure I normally keep because I wanted to make sure I paced that out good.”
UFC president Dana White has already pumped the brakes on the idea of an immediate rematch, but Diaz is hopeful Jorge Masvidal keeps it real and forces the promotion to put the two back in the cage against each other.
”Yeah because If you’re the baddest motherf**ker, are you gonna take that as a win?” Diaz asked. “Like Conor, when I fought Conor. It was a win, fair game. But I wasn’t finished. He knows I wasn’t finished. I was ready to rock. And that’s my plan, that’s my next move. I would love to run it back, that’s the only thing I want to do. That’s my full intention. But I can already see the f**kery coming. I know how this game works. I give all the rematches and make names for all these people. I believe I was responsible for this whole shit. I brought the president, straight up. I don’t see the president going to no title fights. So I believe it’s fair and hopefully they don’t throw a bunch of money Jorge’s way to ‘Let’s do something else.’”
”Dana already talking that s**t, you know? I need to get my rematch and I’ll come back, do things right, do things safe. Come back 100% and win this fight. Seal the real deal.”
”Conor didn’t take the rematch,” Nate added. “Hopefully Masvidal takes the rematch. I be taking all the rematches, you know what I’m saying? Because I’m like I won, and I’ll do it again. That’s what I hope we’ll make happen here and I hope everybody gets on the same page and we work together. Otherwise it might be a f**kery three years off again. And I can already see them coming to the media with this Dana White ‘I don’t know about that.’ That’s how it starts.”
”My plan is to tell em all ‘f**k you’ and then hopefully we get along soon, and then let’s get back at it. That’s my plan. You have to kill me in there. This whole s**t happened and I’d like for it to happen again. F**k you, with all due respect.”
That sure sounds like a recipe for Diaz walking away again, but he relented and said he’d think about other fight possibilities so long as they recognized him as a headline fighter deserving of headline fights against big deal opponents.
”Come back at me with some 100% … don’t play me like you have, and this is where it starts, I can feel it already,” Diaz said. “So if we’re going to do something else, don’t be telling me I’m gotta fight Joe Blow over here because I don’t want to hear that. And they say ‘We offered him fights, we offered him fights,’ I ain’t trying to hear all that. I plan on getting along with them, I hope they plan on getting along back.”
So what do you think, Maniacs? If not Masvidal, then who?