(“Was it you, Bisping or was it you, Tiki? I bet it was Arianny. She always seems like she be hidin’ somethin’.”)
Hopefully we’re way off, but if his recent bizarre accusations are any indicator of his current frame of mind, Quinton Jackson might be just a few energy drinks and consecutive screenings of “The Secret” away from playing monster truck smash-up derby again.
In an interview with Kevin Iole from Yahoo! Sports yesterday, “Rampage” revealed that he believes someone within his training camp is a mole and although he isn’t naming names, he hinted that it’s a sparring partner.
According to the former UFC light heavyweight champion, someone in his close circle is feeding information to his opponents. For example, he says that in spite of the fact that he managed to keep a knee injury he sustained during training camp for his UFC 114 bout with Rashad Evans under the radar from the media, during the bout, “Suga” seemed to target the injury site.
“In all my years of fighting, I’d never been punched in the knee before and I never saw anyone punch someone in the knee,” he said.
Evans, however says that it was simply a case of him feeding off of his opponent’s reaction to a shot and when Rampage let out a moan when the first punch hit his knee, he continued to attack the area.
“I never heard a thing about [him injuring his knee]. I heard him talk about it after the fight. I didn’t know about it going into the fight. When I had him against the cage, I kept hitting him in the knee because of how he was reacting, not because anybody told me anything prior. When you’re in a fight, you just go for what you can get a reaction from,” Evans explains. “I’d punch him in the toe if I felt it was bothering him. We were leaning against the cage and it was really hard to take him down from there. I really couldn’t do much to him and he couldn’t do much to me. I wanted to keep the position and so I didn’t want the referee to break us. So I had to keep looking busy and I saw it was bothering him, so I kept hitting him in his leg. That was it.”
Still, Jackson says he is convinced that someone close to him is playing the part of a spy for the enemy.
When he became suspicious that there was a traitor in his midst, he created a story that he injured his hand to try to smoke out the wrongdoer and only told a select few of his training partners whom he suspected as being the guilty party. Within a few hours he received a call from Brazil from UFC matchmaker Joe Silva inquiring about the seriousness of the injury. He had received a call from Jon Jones’ manager, Malki Kawa, who informed him about Jackson’s ailment. Adding to Jackson’s paranoia is the fact that Kawa proclaimed that he knows Jackson’s every move and that he had people in place to tell him what his gameplan is and what he is working on for his UFC 135 showdown with Jones on September 24.
Kawa chalks it up to gamesmanship and says he read about Jackson’s alleged injury on Twitter and wanted to check on the story’s legitimacy. With the number of people on the social media site, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that someone overheard the news about Jackson’s injury in the gym and decided to play the part of an MMA news-breaker.
“I promise to God, I have no spy in that camp,” Kawa assures. “It’s completely and totally untrue. There is nothing to it at all. It’s funny he said that, though, because we’ve heard he has had old training partners of Jon coming in to work with him. We don’t care and it’s kind of hilarious he’s doing this. But I can guarantee you there is nothing at all that is true about this other than that I called Joe Silva after someone put out a thing on Twitter that Rampage was injured and pulling out. I wanted to know what was up, but it was no more than that. That is it.”
It happens all the time. But Jackson isn’t buying it, which could make for a very uncomfortable next few weeks with his entire camp being suspects.
“One of my friends was talking to Jon Jones’ manager recently, and Jon Jones’ manager was saying that he knows everything that is going on in our camp. He said he had spies in our camp and he knew everything that was going on. That got me thinking. How did he know about my hand injury that fast? It wasn’t on the Internet, and yet he knew about my hand injury right away,” Jackson point out. “The UFC people were in Brazil, which is why it probably took them four hours to call me. That shows me two things: They have spies in my camp, one, and two, they’re dumb as hell, because they didn’t know how to use the information correctly and to wait. He called right away, running to Joe Silva. Joe Silva called my manager right away.”
In spite of his suspicions, Jackson says he won’t name names even if he catches the spy red handed.
“I don’t do that,” Jackson says. “That will be between me and him. I would never out him publicly.”
Hopefully the distraction, which is working better than Jones’ camp could have dreamed, doesn’t affect his performance against the dominant champion.
“Of course they’re going to say they aren’t doing it, but we’ll put the story out there to the fans and let them decide,” Jackson says. “I don’t care what Jon Jones is doing, and I don’t care what his game plan is. I have zero care. I still have the honor of a fighter and going into battle the right way, not spying on my opponent. I’m not scared about my opponent, asking a lot of questions or worrying about what he’s doing. I don’t even watch film.”
Well this is certainly a new one.