It was weirdly comforting on Wednesday to hear Nate Diaz say he slept through his open workout.
The younger Diaz has been gone for a minute—out some 13 months squabbling with ownership over his pay—and when he returns on Saturday to fight Rafael dos Anjos in the co-main event of UFC on Fox 13, it will be to a fight company that has made some tectonic shifts in his absence.
With third-party sponsors being cut out, high-profile brand partnerships in the works and a greenhorn professional wrestler now touted as the UFC’s next big drawing card, it felt good to be reminded that some things stubbornly refuse to change.
“I didn’t realize it was time to be there,” Diaz told MMAJunkie.com’s Steven Marrocco and Matt Erickson, after he no showed the media event. “I woke up and they were calling me, and they said, ‘You kinda missed open workouts.’ I kind of slept in. I wish I could’ve made it, but I didn’t make it in time.”
If any other veteran of 19 fights and more than seven years in the UFC said the same, you could be mad at him. We’ve known for a long time, however, that Nick and Nate Diaz don’t occupy the same reality as the rest of us.
In our world, things are vastly different now: the sudden crush of live events, the heedless rush into international expansion, the never-ending glut of injuries, the years-long steroid scandals, the sudden appearance of WWE’s CM Punk as the most unqualified person ever to get a shot in the Octagon. There’s been so much wholesale change in the UFC universe, we sometimes don’t even recognize the sport we all grew up loving.
But on Planet Diaz, it’s still business as usual. That feels nice, right?
This whole week has been a tour de force in being a Diaz brother, and after so much time away there was just something gloriously, wonderfully normal about it all. Like eating at your favorite greasy spoon restaurant, where the food is a little odd but the cooks feel like family.
More and more, though, you have to wonder if these are also farewell performances.
Nate is going off as about a 2-1 underdog to dos Anjos, according to Odds Shark. This will be a tough matchup for him after so much time out of the cage. If he loses he’ll be just 1-3 in his last four Octagon appearances. Likewise, Nick opened as more than a 3-1 long shot for his January superfight against Anderson Silva. A loss there would be his third straight.
Just like the losses, it seems as though the absences—the contract holdouts, the on-again, off-again retirements—are becoming more frequent. And each time the Diaz brothers are away, the changes to the sport become more drastic. It’s all enough to make you question how long our favorite misfits will choose to stick around in a company that tries to tell them what they can and can’t wear and suddenly traffics in the celebrity of rookie pro wrestlers.
Each time they return, they say it’s because they have no choice—they need the money—and this week, Nate Diaz came as close as he ever has to admitting he doesn’t think it’s worth it anymore.
“I have a job to get done this week but at the same time, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he told ESPN’s Brett Okamoto. “I just feel like a company and a fighter should treat each other mutually. Instead, I feel like I put in a hell of a lot more than I get back and when I ask for more, I get trashed. I don’t think I’ll ever get the work and damage I’ve done to myself back—and if I keep going, it’s just going to get worse. So, what the f— am I doing it for?”
This was the first time we’d heard from him since Dec. 2, when a message was posted to his personal Twitter account that appeared to let everybody know what he thought of the UFC’s new exclusive apparel deal with Reebok. He later posted that his account was hacked, and though rumors persist that he was fined by the UFC for the original comment, he stuck to his story on Wednesday.
“First of all, I didn’t tweet that—I was hacked,” Diaz told Marrocco and Erickson. “But if I feel a certain way, I’m going to say it. Other people should speak up instead of saying yes to everybody, because that just downgrades yourself. The whole UFC is a bunch of yes men and they act appreciative when none of them really are. And that’s just fine. I’m going to say how I feel, and no bullsh-ting.”
Clearly there is some delicious irony in Diaz claiming his Twitter account was hacked. And, no, you’re also not imagining things if you think the above quote reads as Diaz denying he posted the tweet while simultaneously saying he sort of agrees with its message. It also bears mentioning that as of this writing, he hasn’t deleted it. The tweet Diaz says he didn’t write is still there, on his personal timeline.
On Thursday—when he finally did make it to a press conference—he doubled down on the whole “say how I feel and no bullsh-ting” thing, voicing his displeasure with the UFC for its recent acquisition of Punk.
“F–k him, f–k the whole situation,” Diaz said, via MMA Junkie’s John Morgan, while also firing a verbal jab the wrestler’s “slicked back hair and puny f–king virgin nose.”
“I don’t think you should just let some millionaire WWE guy just come on over and play a little game, like have fun with his career,” Diaz said. “I’m over here busting my ass, fighting for 10 years and doing my thing and having a serious job that I have to do for this. And this guy is going to come over and probably get paid more than everyone in the room.”
Fact is, how Diaz feels about Punk, or whether or not he posted that tweet about the new UFC uniform deal both feel sort of immaterial at this point. Frankly, it was nice to have his take-no-prisoners media skills back on the scene, but the whole display also made it feel like the divide between the fighter and the organization is only getting wider.
These days the UFC is selling a fairly different product, and Nate and Nick are guys who are just never going to fall into lock-step. They’re never willingly going to drape themselves head to toe in corporate-approved fight gear and not make a scene over it. They’re never going to open their arms to a guy they likely view as little better than a celebrity boxing competitor.
As fans, we love them for it, but each passing day these rugged, unfiltered individualists are starting to feel more like outliers. Conventional wisdom says they’ll stick around as long as there is money to be made and that as long as they remain draws, the UFC will continue to have them.
But when have the Diaz brothers ever subscribed to conventional wisdom?
Considering their recent history of inactivity and the extent to which our sport is becoming a whole different animal, it’s easy to imagine their current tours of duty in the Octagon could be their last.
Editor’s note: To top it off, Diaz badly missed weight on Friday, weighing in for his lightweight fight against dos Anjos at 160.6 pounds. He declined to make a second attempt to make 155 and will forfeit 20 percent of his purse.
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