Following their back and forth on Twitter, Nate Diaz vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov doesn’t sound like too bad of a fight at this exact moment. They’ve got history. Their respective entourages ended up brawling at a World Series of Fighting event in 2015, with Nate declaring he’d slapped Khabib upside the head and his team didn’t do s**t.
Them’s fighting words, and now people suddenly have an appetite for Khabib vs. Nate. One fan tagged Dana White in a Twitter post requesting the fight and White responded … only to claim he’d already offered the fight and Nate turned it down!
@EDLEZGIN @TeamKhabib Nate turned the fight down
— Dana White (@danawhite) January 11, 2014
This goes along with the general argument that White has been making about the Diaz brothers for the past two years: he keeps offering them these fights, and they just keep mysteriously turning them down. Whaddaya gonna do?
Meanwhile, we’ve got Nate suggesting he won’t come back for less than $20 million dollars. But we’re pretty sure he wasn’t offered that much to fight Dustin Poirier at UFC 230, so the truth must be somewhere in between.
This fucker can’t stop making shit up about me and I haven’t been offered any fights except the one Iaughed at pic.twitter.com/7gRskEXEP9
— Nathan Diaz (@NateDiaz209) March 20, 2017
“I just think about, I’m not turning down any fight ever,” Diaz told training partner Andre Ward. “They might be turning down the deal. So it’s on them. It’s not in my hands because I’ll fight when you pay.”
Hey, we understand: you can’t just pay Nate Diaz $20 million dollars without blowing up your entire pay structure. But at the same time, the guy was involved in two of the biggest PPVs in the history of the UFC. His fights with Conor McGregor sold 3 million pay-per-views for the UFC, grossing $180 million for the UFC. You can argue that McGregor drove many of those buys, but Diaz not only saved the first fight by stepping in last minute, he turned right around and made the rematch happen.
It probably helped that the UFC was actually willing to open up their wallet to ensure that went down. Did they do the same when they offered Nate a Khabib fight? We doubt he was even offered pay-per-view points, which they’re still trying to keep reserved for champions only.
The UFC is a business, and they have to keep a tight reign on fighter pay. But don’t pretend Nate Diaz isn’t fighting because he’s just a crazy dude who marches to the beat of his own drum. Yes, he’s that too. But he just knows how much money he’s made for the UFC, and at this point if they want to sell $50 million worth of pay-per-views off his back, he wants a fair piece of it.