The Bellator featherweight title won’t be on the line until September.
The five-round fight between 145-champion Pat Curran and two-time tournament winner Patricio Freire, originally planned for June 6 and then moved to July, won’t happen earlier than September.
Curran suffered a calf injury and forced the first change, and now “Pitbull” is injured.
“I broke a toe and kept training, but then I heard that he wouldn’t be able to fight in July so I’m focused on treating this,” Freire told MMAFighting.com.
“My fight with Curran will probably be around September. I think I will probably fight for the title in September, but I don’t know what’s going to happen now that they are out.”
By “they”, Freire means Bjorn Rebney, the chairman and CEO of Bellator, and Tim Danaher, president and COO, who left the promotion on Wednesday. Scott Coker, founder and CEO of Strikeforce, is the new president of Bellator MMA.
“I just heard about it. I don’t know the details, but I heard that Bjorn and Tim left,” Freire said of the news. “The only thing I can say is that I treated Bellator as a family for a long time. We had our problems, but it’s in the past. They fixed some issues recently and our relationship was better.
“We always had mutual respect. I only have good things to say about them. We had our problems, but we settled it.”