Conor McGregor’s manager Audie Attar said on The MMA Hour last month that it would be good for Nate Diaz to fight Tony Ferguson and beat him to get McGregor “excited” for a third bout with Diaz.
On Wednesday, Diaz got fired up talking about that notion and it’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t want to fight Ferguson this summer, he told Ariel Helwani on a special edition of The MMA Hour.
“For one, I never ever said I was waiting for a third fight with Conor McGregor,” Diaz said. “I never said that. People think what they wanted and said that I wanted another fight with Conor. I already whipped Conor’s f*ckin’ ass. He should want a fight with me. I gotta light a fire up under his ass?”
Diaz beat McGregor at UFC 196 last year by submission and then McGregor beat him in the rematch at UFC 202 last August. They were two of the biggest pay-per-view events in UFC history.
The latter was a hard-fought majority decision for McGregor. One judge had it a draw; it was a close bout. Diaz believes he was the rightful winner and the UFC pulled strings with the Nevada Athletic Commission judges to give McGregor the nod.
“Conor is a f*cking bitch,” Diaz said. “He f*cking got his ass whooped, he got choked. And now he’s justifying it because the decision went to him because the company wanted it to go to him. If I get my f*cking ass whooped by somebody, I don’t just win a slight decision and then accept it as a win. So the real champ is right here.”
McGregor went on to become the UFC lightweight champion with a second-round knockout victory over Eddie Alvarez last November at UFC 205. McGregor was already the featherweight champion after beating Jose Aldo by KO in 2015, so “The Notorious” became the first fighter in the UFC history to hold two different weight-class titles at the same time when he beat Alvarez.
Diaz, of course, has a different interpretation of things.
“I’m the two-time world champ, because I whipped his f*cking ass after he fought Jose Aldo and I whipped his ass right before he fought Eddie Alvarez,” Diaz said. “And he knocked these guys out and everybody seems to have forgot what happened. It just went away?”
McGregor called Diaz a “bitch” recently and Diaz turned the word around on him Wednesday. He said McGregor was the one who wanted out of that second fight when he got dragged into deep waters.
“He’s the f*cking bitch,” Diaz said. “You’re the f*cking bitch, Conor. You f*cking got your ass whipped and you’re running around like, ‘I’m the two-belt champion, I overcame adversity.’ I’m like when? When you were quitting in that second fight? In the third round, he was making sounds like, ‘ugh, ugh.’
“He’s like crying, you know what I’m saying? When you’re a fighter, you understand. You know when somebody is being a little bitch.”
Diaz said he doesn’t want to fight Ferguson and doesn’t want to return to the Octagon until either the UFC ponies up considerably more money or an opponent emerges who motivates him to want to fight.
As for that McGregor trilogy bout, one that would likely garner boatloads of money for all involved, Diaz said he’s not interested.
“I don’t want a f*cking third fight,” Diaz said. “F*ck Conor. He can f*cking fight himself.”
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