Newark — To hear Sean Strickland tell it, perhaps too much is being made of his rivalry with Khamzat Chimaev ahead of their middleweight fight at UFC 328 this Saturday.
Take, for instance, talk of them meeting in the gym. “We only sparred once, and I think we did a three-round spar. We sparred once,” Strickland (30-7) noted. Under a minute of that spar has appeared in footage spread online, leaked by Chimaev.
“When I go to a gym, I want to spar the best guy. I want to spar him. But he would always go beat up the lower level guys,” he said of the brief time the pair were in each other’s orbit.
The match-up, admitted Strickland during Wednesday’s UFC 328 media day, is “a good fight. I think it’s a fun fight.” And, he added, “what else in the top five of the division do you have right now?”
As for the back-and-forth between the pair, with Chimaev suggesting his team could jump Strickland, and Strickland, a gun enthusiast, saying he’d shoot them, Strickland downplayed that as well.
“I don’t think he gives a f*ck, does he? How did this even get started? Oh, I know how it got started, he said something about jumping me. He made a joke about ‘oh my friends would jump you.’ And I said ‘dude you’re a f*cking coward, I’m a grown-ass man.'”
“At no point in my life have I ever said ‘I’m going to jump this man.’ To me, to say that and look myself in the mirror after saying that and saying that I’m going to threaten you with my gang, it kind of makes me feel like a p*ssy,” Strickland continued.
That led to Strickland, usually suffering from a bad case of verbal diarrhea, making the claim that he’d pull a gun if attacked. “Not in Jersey, because we’re in a f*cking communist state, but in Vegas, if I walk outside and there’s three f*cking Chechens, I legally can put a f*cking bullet in each and every one of them. Why? Because in America, we value being a f*cking man. In America, we value one on one fights, we value stand your ground. What we don’t value is being a f*cking weak third-world f*cking p*ssy who threatens [with] friends. It’s such a soft, soft mentality. Soft man, soft man.”
By Sean Strickland standards, it was still a somewhat reserved media day. He didn’t have his mic muted or the plug pulled on his appearance. For all UFC CEO and President Dana White talks of free speech, Strickland has always been the one to push the boundaries the furthest. But on Wednesday, fans also gained insight into just why Strickland is the way he is.
Middleweight champ Chimaev recently posted on social media that Strickland’s father had made him “a girl.” Strickland, who has reacted poorly in the past to talk of his father (just ask Dricus Du Plessis), opened up a little on the troubled home he grew up in.
“My dad kind of made me violent because he was such a weak man. You’re going to find that, maybe Chimaev included— growing up, my dad was like the boogeyman. He was the scariest f*cking thing, the scariest thing in my life. I watched him beat up my mom, throw beer bottles at me. So it’s like to me, my dad almost made me a little bit sociopathic, more like a sociopath than anything. It probably did more harm than good.”
At 17, Strickland confronted his father about not letting his mother go to work one day. When his father got in his face and questioned his resolve, Strickland headbutted the man. “I headbutted him, broke his nose, [he] fell down, and this guy started crying. And it was so disappointing to me, because I’d seen this guy who was this psychopath my whole life who I was scared of, and you just see this whiny little bitch on the floor bleeding. So if anything, I would say my dad more made me a sociopath, why I’m going to have to shoot three Chechens under Stand Your Ground law.”
If nothing else, Strickland was on better behavior than usual on Wednesday, something the UFC will no doubt be grateful for. Of course, there’s still a press conference and weigh-ins to go.
Watch the full UFC 328 media day appearance by Sean Strickland above.
