Toronto – At this point we know what UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland brings to the UFC both in and out of the cage, and he was true to form as he prepares to face Dricus du Plessis at UFC 297.
He did start out talking about du Plessis as a fighter.
“I think this is going to be a harder fight than Izzy (Adesanya). The thing about Dricus is he just likes to fight. Is he the best, nah probably not, but he goes in there and just f*cking fights to win, and that’s a hard fight,” Strickland told reporters including Cageside Press on Wednesday.
“I trained with a lot of guys I’m way better than and they just mentally want to be there and then makes it a tough f*cking fight. I’m way better than him. I’m a better grappler, I’m better f*cking jiu jitsu.”
It wasn’t just the skillset, but the resume that makes Strickland believe he’s better than du Plessis.
“What is his accolades? He f*cking beat a dead horse Derek Brunson? I mean is he even in the UFC? They f*cking cut him after that. That performance was so f*cking terrible. I think he might have died on the f*cking stool,” Strickland said.
“Then you go and fight Whittaker, and Whittaker was a great fight, but was that the Whittaker we’ve ever seen? Whittaker f*cking quit. Maybe he’s just that f*cking good, but I just think he fought two dead horses, put them out to pasture.”
Being champion doesn’t mean much to Strickland as he
“I don’t give a f*ck about this belt. This is the f*cking Matrix man. What, I lose this fight, I go back to the f*cking APEX, and we do our little song and dance for a couple more years and I vanish? This is all f*cking bullsh*t. I love UFC, they give me lots of money, I’m happy, but this is f*cked dude,” he said.
Strickland has had quite the transformation from his early days in the UFC where he answered questions with a ‘yes sir, no sir’ to now, not only going after fellow fighters, but also the media.
“A lot of it was where I came from. I came from being a white trash, shaved head, kicked out of school for a f*cking hate crime. I came from being such a piece of sh*t so it’s just like whenever I got in front of the camera, you look at your peers. You look at the guys at the time who are the champs and they carry themselves so well, and they wore f*cking suits,” Strickland told Cageside Press.
“You’re like man I want to have money. I want to distance myself from who I was. So I really tried to fit that f*cking image and I f*cking hated it man. Every time I wore a f*cking suit I felt like a c*nt. I felt like I didn’t belong.”
“It’s way more freeing not to have to like fit the mold of a f*cking superstar. It’s way f*cking better.”
Strickland also touched on the now famous DMs that he sent du Plessis following their dust up at UFC 296.
“No I didn’t DM and say I’m going to stab him. I DM’d him and said, Dricus I like you. You’re a f*cking stand up guy. You fight hard,” he said.
“I just simply said man that’s a line that I’d prefer that we didn’t go there.”
Watch the entire media day scrum with Sean Strickland above. He defends his UFC middleweight title against Dricus du Plessis at UFC 297.
