UFC legend Nick Diaz has admitted that issues outside of the cage caused him to enter cage 'not going to win' during his comeback fight with Robbie Lawler.
The former world title contender made his return after six years in September 2021 to face ex-welterweight champion Lawler, and was stopped in the third round. He had seemed disinterested heading into the bout and even demanded that the weight be brought up from welterweight to middleweight with days before the pair hit the scales.
And he has now admitted that he felt "backed into" training for the fight, having switched up teams and struggled to get himself in the right mindset for a fight. Ultimately, he ended up finding it difficult to prepare properly and lost in the third round to Lawler, who had lost his previous four and proceeded to lose his next outing.
“I went into training camp, and I kind of got backed into it, too,” Diaz said on the Dying To See Me podcast. “I was in between management, it wasn’t like when I went and found a group to work with and organise my situation. I went back and forth between the people I was working with and some of the old people I was working with during this training camp and my trainers.
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“I couldn’t amount to a level of athleticism I needed to be competitive, and I knew that going into the fight. Then I was going into this fight like, ‘Oh, man. I really got it coming.’ So, I didn’t really go in there to win. I just needed to get that first fight out, I hadn’t fought in a long time. I’d never fought under those conditions.”
He is, however, still keen to make another comeback almost two years after the brutal loss and after recovering from a neck injury which he suffered in the lead-up to the fight from a biking accident. It has been over 11 years since he last won a fight, when he defeated BJ Penn in 2011, but he is still looking to fight once more, declaring that he will do “Whatever makes most sense,”
