Tony Ferguson is open to a fight with either of the “two knuckleheads” that sparked chaos following UFC 229’s main event.
The man lost in the shuffle at UFC 229 was without question Tony Ferguson. Ferguson won an all-out war against former UFC and WEC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis at the show. Yet thanks to the insanity that broke loose following the main event, Ferguson’s gutsy, bloody performance wound up overlooked by man fans, who focused solely on, as Ferguson later called them, “two knuckleheads.”
Yet Ferguson did win. His eleventh straight win in the UFC, in fact. Ferguson (24-3) has defeated two former champions in that time. He’s looked good in every fight while surviving scares in nearly every one. He’s a character outside the cage, a quirky personality who doesn’t hold back with the media. The kind of guy the UFC should be pushing — and following UFC 229, he said he’s open to fighting either one of the main eventers.
Ferguson would also call out both Nurmagomedov and McGregor for giving the sport of MMA a black eye. “I’ve been the champ, I am the champ. You have these two knuckleheads over there making this sport look bad,” Ferguson said at the post-fight press conference. “So when I had that media scrum over there, and I yelled at all you guys, ‘Don’t be feeding that bullsh*t.’ Straight up. I am the champ. I don’t have a belt up here, I don’t need a belt up here to be the champ. So if you guys want to feed that, go ahead. Put that in your pocket and take it with you. But what I’m doing here is cleaning up the sport. This is an Olympic-level type of sport and it needs to be cleaned up.”
“Khabib and I deserve to fight,” he’d add. What Ferguson doesn’t want to see is an instant rematch between Khabib and Conor. “Rematch? The dude got finished,” he said. “The dude got straight-up finished. No, I’m going to stop you right there. The guy got finished. If you get finished, you need to move the f*ck on.”
Taking a quick poll among the media by show of hands, Ferguson said again later in the press conference that he deserved the next title shot. But that said, “if you want to give me Conor, I’ll go toe-to-toe with him,” he added. “I would love to go toe-to-toe with him. A Mexican warrior vs. an Irish warrior? That’s pretty proper, I gotcha.”
