(If triathlons allowed you to punch other racers, and the participants got paid millions of dollars to do it, well, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Props: CombatLifestyle.com)
Despite that totally official press release claiming that Jeff Lacy had already signed for the fight, Strikeforce welterweight champion Nick Diaz will not be facing Lacy in a boxing match. In fact, Diaz will be sticking to the sport that he seemingly can’t stand — and it’s becoming very obvious what’s convincing him to stay.
According to a new press release, Diaz will continue pursuing his MMA career instead of professional boxing, “as it has been deemed that it be in Nick’s best interest to focus on his primary combat sport and profession…an opportunity arose for Nick to make a different sort of history in his primary field of fighting.”
Diaz’s coach Cesar Gracie previously made it known that “unless GSP is offered up as a sacrifice [by the UFC], Nick will fight Lacy.” At the time, Gracie/Diaz’s well-publicized interest in a new boxing career was interpreted by many to be a leveraging strategy, to convince the UFC to step in and offer Diaz a welterweight title shot against Georges St. Pierre. If that’s the case, it worked like a charm. Still, Gracie wants everybody to know that the boxing thing wasn’t just a ruse. From the press release, again:
“There are some people that have said we were just posturing to go into professional boxing and they don’t understand that this thing is something we had been working on since 2009. It wasn’t just out of nowhere but at this point in time, there’s a certain chance that comes along once in a very long while and it only makes sense to stick to MMA as of right now. Nick’s been working really hard to get to this point in his MMA career and it wouldn’t make sense for us to make that transition into boxing right now. If this were a couple months ago or if certain fights had played out differently, we’d definitely be ready to go into boxing, but that’s not how it played out. Don Chargin is a great boxing promoter and he understood our dilemma completely and I thank him for that.”
Chargin added:
“Nick is a good kid and a very exciting fighter. Right now he has an opportunity of a lifetime as it pertains to his MMA career. While I don’t doubt that Nick and his team were serious about taking the big step into boxing, it only makes sense for him to finish what he started and see how far he can go in MMA before he does anything in boxing…I’ve had a long promotional career filled with numerous big events dating back the 1960s. Taking Nick Diaz into boxing would have undoubtedly been a big one but this is Nick’s career and his legacy as a MMA fighter needs to be solidified now. I wish him all the luck going forward and know that Zuffa will have itself one very exciting fighter for many years to come.”
Rumor has it that the fight between Nick Diaz and Georges St. Pierre will be announced sometime this week. GSP is already a hypothetical 4-1 favorite against his next challenger.
In a related story, former welterweight/junior middleweight boxing champion Ricardo Mayorga is trying to get a piece of that sweet boxing vs. MMA action the only way he knows how — by calling everybody the Spanish words for “faggot” and “whore.” Mayorga, who was scheduled to fight Din Thomas last May in a Shine Fights MMA bout that imploded in spectacular fashion at the last minute, has been blasting folks on Twitter lately. Here a representative sample, via MiddleEasy:
Also? “@bjpenndotcom after I KO you, I will put a hawaiin dress on u fatty and make u do hula hula dance- remember Im a real fighter puto.” Follow this man right now.
Nick Diaz
Nate Diaz
The MMA Hour