It’s hard to blame Nate Diaz for giving out about the way the UFC promote him.
When the UFC’s motley crew made its highly-anticipated return to Dublin in 2014, media were brought aside during the guest fighter Q&A with the fans. We were ushered upstairs in the 3Arena (then called the O2) for a press conference with Dana White.
For the guts of an hour, the UFC president face five years worth of questions from the Irish journalists. White dropped the bombshell that day that Khabib Nurmagomedov had been forced to withdraw from a fight against Donald Cerrone. The Dagestani, who’s been making the headlines recently for pulling out of an even bigger fight, blew out his knee just minutes after putting pen to paper on the contract.
Before every possible subject was covered and the discussion devolved into a chat about how much White could lift in the gym, Nate Diaz’s name sprung up. White confidently said that the Stockton native was ‘not a needle-mover,’ although his bigger brother most certainly was.
A couple of years later, White would be eating his words as the guy who couldn’t draw a crowd headlined two of the promotion’s most lucrative PPVS alongside Conor McGregor. His back-to-back welterweight brawls against the Notorious thrust Diaz into the limelight and for the first time in his career, he had broken into the mainstream.
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Once Ice Cube posted that promo for his movie Fist Fight on Instagram, everyone was reminded yet again of how much Nate Diaz’s stock had risen since he shocked the world and beat McGregor. However, according to the man himself, the UFC tried to get him booted out of the project.
Diaz explained to USA Today that a friend of his sorted him out with the gig sparring with comedy titan Charlie Day to promote the movie. Although he featured in the cut that did the rounds on the internet, he claims that the UFC urged the movie’s bosses to use McGregor or Georges St-Pierre instead of him.
“The UFC is like, ‘We’re thinking GSP or Conor McGregor. My guy said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to use Nate.’ They came back to say, ‘We really think you should use GSP or Conor.”
Diaz wasn’t surprised. He knows that the Irish and Canadian superstars are more marketable in the conventional sense. He couldn’t care less though. To him, the look or ability to speak clearly and coherently pales as a marketing tool in comparison to attitude.
And he’s got heaps of that stuff.
“I don’t know what it is. I’m not a white boy with blue eyes or great looking, I talk all (messed) up. I’m not the look they’re going for, but this is fighting. You don’t go for a look. You go for the baddest that’s out there. This is an example of my whole career.”
Never change, Nate.
