Nate Diaz turned down the fight. We heard it over and over from Dana White. Nate Diaz turned down the fight. We’ve offered him a fight with everyone on the roster and he turned it down. The latest conversation centered around a welterweight title shot against Tyron Woodley to boast UFC 219’s selling power, but it faded out with the culprit supposedly being a lack of compensation. In a recent interview covering everything from his contract, rap, weed and Conor McGregor, Diaz himself broke down exactly why he’s made himself unavailable to the UFC.
“I have some ideas for this year [for a fight] so when it’s time to pull the trigger and finally tell them what’s going down, I’ll but it out, but I want to see how the fights this weekend go and see how some stuff goes. That’s the thing, there’s a lot of fighters that are bad mouthing me too. Fighters are like, ‘He ain’t no fighter, he ain’t no fighter.’ I already fought more than everybody in the UFC. Everyone in the UFC except Randy Couture, Tito Ortiz, BJ Penn, Michael Bisping – who has actually done a lot. I have more fights than anyone on the roster. In the whole roster. That’s from activity from 21 to 30-years old and I’ve been slow the last few years just chilling, fighting once a year. They’ll say, ‘he’s not a fighter, he don’t even fight, he don’t even fight,’ because I haven’t been that active in these last few years. I’m like, hold up. I’m not fighting because I am a fighter. You’re fighting because someone’s telling you to fight.”
Ufc offered me title fight in any weight class Im kool though I’ll givem a shot when they do something good
On to the next sport for now 🥊🥊— Nathan Diaz (@NateDiaz209) December 9, 2017
“I’ll fight whenever the f-ck I want to fight. That’s cause I’m a G, n-gga. I’m a fighter myself. You know what I’m saying? I ain’t trying to do what nobody says, I’m trying to do what I say and I will fight when I am approached respectively. ‘Will you please fight,’ because things change and you don’t need to fight. I’ve already been fighting too long I’m like man, I don’t need to fight nobody. I’ll fight anybody but I don’t need to fight anybody. You know? And the fighters are like, ‘He’s not a fighter.’ I’m like, it sounds like you’re being manipulated into trying to manipulate me into getting into a fight. I’m like, guess what? You work for somebody, I work for me. Who’s the fighter now, motherf-cker? […] Ask nicely, motherf-ckers. Ask nicely. I’m talking about the organization, the fighters. And make it a big deal, because I’m not trying to just sign a contract just cause it’s a good idea for you guys.” — Nate Diaz speaking on the Outside the Box podcast.
Insert Keanu Reeves saying ‘whoa’ animated GIF. The UFC may have accounted for Conor McGregor becoming big enough to call all his own shots and wait until it was the perfect deal to come back, but the same thing happened indirectly to Nate Diaz. His call-out and consequential choke-out of McGregor rocketed him into a fame that alluded him his whole career. The all-out war of a rematch only added fuel to the fire. The UFC and Dana White may continue to be frustrated by negotiations with Nate Diaz, but they’ll never let him go either. They know, his next fight is huge, if they can ever make it happen.
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 12/20/2017.