(BJ Penn is the ultimate killing machine. Seriously, do you know how many shrimp had to die in order to make his lunch?)
Unless your name is Ken Shamrock, you probably wouldn’t carve a second mouth into your face in order to avoid a fight that you already agreed to. And yet, BJ Penn is questioning Rory MacDonald‘s excuse for withdrawing from their scheduled meeting at UFC 152, claiming that the young Canadian pulled out because he knew he wasn’t going to win, and that withdrawing from a fight due to a cut is a cowardly move in the first place. Here’s what Penn told Sherdog in an interview published yesterday; roll up your pants because the bullshit is about to get deep in here…
“I know the reason why Rory pulled out on September 22nd. The cut is a detail but I know the reason why he pulled out is ’cause he knew he wasn’t gonna win. If he let that cut heal, tried to train, whatever it was, whether he should have been in shape already…I’ve never heard of a guy pulling out of a fight 10 weeks early from a cut. [Ed. note: It was actually seven weeks early, but you can’t blame Penn for rounding up in order to make a point.] Never in my life have I heard of a guy, 10 weeks before a fight, he got cut, he pulled out. You know what I mean? He feels he has to do what’s best for him, for his team, they’re gonna do that, but it’s 100 percent fact that the reason why they pulled out is because they knew they were gonna lose on September 22nd. If not, you wouldn’t pull out.
Like I said, I had a cut on my eye, 13 stitches inside and out five weeks before the Diaz fight. I didn’t care. Opened up from eight weeks, opened up every week all the way up to the fifth week before the Diaz fight but did I ever think about pulling out? Not even *once*. Why? Because I owe it to the fans, I owe it to the UFC, I even owe it to Nick Diaz to show up to the fight. If you’re gonna tell the guy you’re gonna go to the fight, go to the fight.”
Now, the idea of a young killer like MacDonald ducking the declining Penn — who has won just a single fight since 2009 — well, that’s absolutely positively fucktarded, right? Either Penn is trolling to get inside Rory’s head, or he’s delusional enough to actually believe the words that are coming out of his own face. Personally, I’m going to go with option B. Penn suffers from the same condition that afflicts Rampage Jackson and Tito Ortiz, where you still consider yourself the best in the world despite all evidence to the contrary.
Directly after Penn gave that quote, Sherdog’s Greg Savage suggests that maybe Rory pulled out because he didn’t want to be subjected to random drug testing. Now that’s a conspiracy theory worth jumping on, but BJ doesn’t really take the bait. Nope, he’s going to stick with his original story: Rory MacDonald — a guy who dominated Nate Diaz before utterly destroying Mike Pyle and Che Mills — is terrified of meeting BJ Penn in the year 2012. Sure thing, brah.