Neil Magny wanted to unite the UFC’s roster over the weekend at the promotion’s Fighter Retreat in Las Vegas.
Magny prepared a speech that he planned to deliver right before the private Snoop Dogg concert that was put in place for them, and went through quite a bit in attempt to get on stage before the show and give everybody a piece of his mind (quotes via MMA Fighting):
“I got all fired up, and I was trying to get to the stage to get the speech out, but it was so many hoops I had to jump through,” he said. “At first it was, alright, who has the microphone? So I went to the DJ booth, got a hold of the DJ, and was like hey, I have this speech, I’m really excited about it, I just want to get a chance on the mic, and get it out to as many fighters as possible and let them know to start working together now.
“So the DJ booth sent me over to the sound guy, and sound guy sent me over to this guy. I was jumping through hoops trying to get a hold of someone, and by the time I got it I said you know what, I’m not going to risk getting in trouble, I’m just going to go directly through the UFC, and just ask them permission to do so.”
Unfortunately, Magny was shot down when he asked the UFC for permission to go onstage, as they had to lock the stage down because Snoop was about to take center stage. The promotion told him he was more than welcome to speak to his fellow fighters after the concert, but in the end, Magny opted otherwise:
“They said right now we have to lock this space down because we got Snoop Dogg and his security staff and stuff like that, and for security reasons we can’t allow you to go up on stage use the microphone,” Magny said.
“Immediately after that, they said if I want to stick around afterwards and give the speech then, I was more than welcome to do so. I was like, alright, I’ll hang around until afterwards and do it. But by the end of the evening with Snoop Dogg being on stage, open bars and being there a couple of hours and him coming out two-and-a half hours late, it was just way too late in the evening. At that point, the people who were standing around weren’t interested and weren’t in a position to even take in what I had to say.”
You can check out the speech that Magny was prepared to deliver here below:
“First I want to thank the UFC staff for working so hard to put this event together. Thank you guys, we really appreciate all you do.
“Second, I want to address fighter issues. We don’t need a group of fancy lawyers to speak for us, we need to speak up for one another. There are deals in place that may not please everyone and there’s not much we all can do about it. Instead of bitching about the things we can’t change, let’s work on the things that we can control within our reach. There are about 300 of us here this weekend posting about this athlete retreat on social media. By the end of the weekend, our posts will have reached millions of people.
“What if we all came together to support our colleagues the same way? If, say, Matt Brown has an idea, how well will it do if we supported it? And when the next guy has an idea, we support him or her? Let’s stop beating each other down outside of the cage and start helping each other.”
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