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WSOF President Ray Sefo on Melvin Guillard: "I'm not going to tolerate anybody who's not going to be professional"
Apr 9, 2015 - 6:05:58 PM WSOF President Ray Sefo on Melvin Guillard: "I'm not going to tolerate anybody who's not going to be professional"

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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief

WSOF President Ray Sefo has expanded on the Melvin Guillard situation, ripping into the lightweight fighter for being unprofessional during his entire tenure with the organization, with that ultimately leading to his removal from the WSOF 20 card on Friday.

During a media conference call this week to promote Friday's event, Sefo commented on the issues they've had with Guillard from the outset. Here's some of what Sefo had to say (via MMAFighting.com):

"Like I told his managers, from day one, his first fight with us he missed weight and he came up with some sort of excuse. Listen, I'm the guy that fights for the fighters all the time, but when a fighter's unprofessional and doesn't live up to the obligations of his contract, I want to be the first one to step up and say something.

"[Guillard] missed weight for his first fight. He missed weight for a world title fight. He put us at risk in terms of...because, what happens if he'd won that fight? And then our PR team has reached out to him and his management team to do PR. He just completely ignored that, and then he goes off and does his own interview with somebody else and trash talks the company. It's just, you know, I'm not going to tolerate that kind of behavior.

"He was given a deadline, which was going to be last Friday for his medicals, and that didn't happen. Then (Vice President/matchmaker) Ali (Abdel-Aziz) sent out an email saying that if he didn't have his medicals by 10 o'clock Monday morning, then he was going to be pulled from the card. At 10 or 11 - 11:30 or 12 - we still hadn't heard anything from his management team, nor had we heard anything from him, so we sent out an email stating all of the things I just said. And that left me no choice but to pull him from the card.

"Funny enough, five or ten minutes later, we get a phone call from his team, but we don't hear from Melvin. So, you know, it's just one of these things. If you want to be a professional fighter, then be professional. You're getting paid good money to fight, and we signed you to a contract. It's just unprofessional. I've been in this game a long time. I've had 101 fights and there's not one time that I was not professional about any fight, even when I was an amateur. Again, I'm not going to tolerate anybody who's not going to be professional, when we are trying everything that we can to help you."

Penick's Analysis: Regardless of whether or not the story on the medicals is legitimate (and it seems that it may be given everything else that's transpired), clearly the interview he gave was just another in a series of issues they've had with him. Honestly, it's hard to blame them for being upset with Guillard, even if Guillard has valid complaints about them. The fact that he missed weight twice and was being as difficult as possible to work with - purposefully this time around, mind you - is certainly enough to cut ties with him, but we'll have to see if that's what they do. If they keep him under contract they'll still have to book him in fights, but they'll have to weigh whether or not it's worth doing that or just cutting ties with him now.