Things got physical at the big public UFC 280 press conference this morning when Petr Yan laid his hands on Sean O’Malley during a faceoff, shoving ‘Suga’ across the stage.
Yan had been doing his best to get under O’Malley’s skin through the entire press conference, hitting him with savage zingers. At one point he said Sean “looked like a whore on the side of the road.”
That elicited a bunch of hoots and hollers from the crowd even before the comment was translated. O’Malley was asked if he wanted to respond and simply said “Nah, that was good. That was good.”
https://twitter.com/ufc/status/1583107364437168133
O’Malley turned up the intensity when it was time to square off in the first staredowns of the week. He stepped right up to Petr Yan and practically leaned over him. After a few moments where the two locked eyes, Yan shoved O’Malley away. Even that didn’t seem to phase ‘Suga,’ who held his hands up and invited the crowd to cheer.
Following the incident he took to Instagram where he shared his thoughts on getting shoved.
“I’d push me too,” he wrote.
Despite all the pressure on Sean O’Malley leading up to his fight with Petr Yan at UFC 280, he’s been playing everything extremely chill. That’s despite UFC president Dana White describing this match with Yan as Sean’s ‘Conor McGregor vs. Jose Aldo fight.’
That match between McGregor and Aldo ended in a 13 second knockout win for ‘The Notorious’ and cemented him as a bona fide superstar in the UFC and mainstream sports.
Asked about the comment, Sean O’Malley said “I feel like ‘Suga’ vs. Petr seems sweeter than Conor vs. Aljo.”
He also implied that Yan was scared to fight him.
“He turned down Chito [Vera]. Petr turned down Chito,” O’Malley said during UFC 280 media day. “So I don’t think he really had an option. I think the UFC went to him and said ‘Hey, you can’t keep turning these guys down, you have to fight ‘The Suga Show.’ I know he was saying he picked that fight. I don’t believe that. I think he got bullied into it.”
With all this talk of getting bullied into the fight, maybe Petr Yan decided to so some bullying of his own on the stage. If he hoped to get inside Sean O’Malley’s head, though, it didn’t seem to work.
What do you think of Petr Yan shoving Sean O’Malley, PENN Nation? Is he inside O’Malley’s head? Or did that aggression prove that it’s O’Malley that’s in Yan’s head? Let us know in the comments!