In the build-up to UFC 279, Dana White tried selling everyone on the notion that Nate Diaz, who was unranked and hadn’t won in three years, fighting top welterweight contender Khamzat Chimaev made complete sense.
Dan Hardy wasn’t buying the UFC president’s words then – and he certainly isn’t buying them now.
“Imagine Nate Diaz (fighting) Khamzat Chimaev. We all know what that was. We all knew what that was,” Hardy said recently on the “Freedom Pact” podcast. “And fortunately it worked out that fight didn’t happen, and then what did we get from Dana the week after? ‘It’s a good thing that fight didn’t happen. That would’ve been really bad.’ Like yeah, man. I don’t have to buy your bullsh*t anymore, because I know it’s bullshit. You know what you’re doing. It was an assassination attempt. They were trying to bury (Diaz) before he left his UFC contract.”
A lot of people viewed the situation Hardy’s way after Diaz spent almost an entire year asking for his release from the UFC while they couldn’t come to an agreement on the final fight of his contract. Eventually the UFC convinced Diaz to accept the Chimaev fight, but Diaz made it clear he had no intention of re-signing. Despite widespread criticism, the UFC pushed forward with Chimaev vs. Diaz as the UFC 279 headliner, which didn’t happen only because Chimaev massively missed the 171-pound limit.
Diaz went on to defeat Tony Ferguson in the makeshift UFC 279 main event, and he’s now a free agent.
All may have ended well for Diaz and the UFC, but Hardy still can’t shake his feeling of what might’ve been.
“That Chimaev against Diaz fight felt more like – it just felt like an execution,” Hardy said. “And that, to me, felt like you’ve got one person or one small group of people that are using one part of the roster to punish the other part of the roster. That’s not sport. That’s dogfighting. It’s just ugly. It’s just an ugly thing, and it make me feel uncomfortable, because I love the sport, and that would damage it.
“Imagine if Nate had gotten really badly hurt. Straight away it would’ve cast a shadow over the UFC, it would’ve been all over the news in a negative way, and it would’ve made us all feel uncomfortable, because we knew it was happening. It was fortunate the MMA gods shined down on us that day. But I also feel like there was some meddling in the background to make sure that didn’t happen. Because I think the closer the fight got, the more the UFC realized how much they were gonna bury themselves if Nate got hurt.”
Hardy, who was released from his duties as UFC commentator in early 2021 following a reported disagreement with a female employee, expects better from the UFC in how it carries itself as the world’s leading MMA organization.
“For me, the UFC has already established itself as the figurehead of the sport. There’s no doubting that, and I don’t think for a second that any other organization is gonna come close to what the UFC are and what they’re doing,” Hardy said. “They will always be the premiership for mixed martial arts. They just need to act like the premiership. They need to act like the premiere league in the sport. They need to be the custodians of the sport.”
