Pelkey's Take
PELKEY: After run of huge announcements by the UFC, enigmatic Nick Diaz brings MMA fans back to earth
Sep 7, 2011 - 7:25:15 PM PELKEY: After run of huge announcements by the UFC, enigmatic Nick Diaz brings MMA fans back to earth

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By Matt Pelkey, MMATorch columnist

Leave it to Nick Diaz to ruin the party. That's a funny thing to say about a habitual pot smoker. Generally they're so amiable and unconfrontational. I suppose his unconfrontationality (new word!) lies at the heart of the matter. Diaz, long considered one of the more entertaining fighters due to his brash in-fight trash talk and three-punches-a-minute style, has also just as long been one of the harder to deal with fighters for promoters.

The story goes that Diaz has social anxiety, which is helped by the marijuana use, which is the reason he HATES the talking-to-the-media portion of promoting his fights. As Dana White was fond of saying, "Nick Diaz just needs to learn how to play the game." But he never has, and Wednesday might've been the last straw.

After stopping Paul Daley in the first round of their April encounter, Diaz had essentially cleaned out the (admittedly thin) Strikeforce Welterweight division. Three weeks later, Georges St. Pierre notched another top-5 victory over Diaz's teammate Jake Shields and was in need of a fresh, interesting challenge. The "business as usual" tagline for how Strikeforce contracted fighters were handled was conveniently ignored, Diaz was released from from his Strikeforce contract, was signed by the UFC, and shortly thereafter signed a fight contract to face Georges St. Pierre at UFC 137 for the UFC Welterweight title.

As part of the deal, Diaz told Dana White he'd do all the standard promotional work leading up to the fight. And that lasted right up until Diaz... had to do promotional work leading up to the fight. It started on Tuesday with Diaz no-showing a press conference in Winnipeg and continued today, pulling the same stunt in Las Vegas, even after Cesar Gracie, Diaz's longtime trainer, assured everyone Diaz would be in Vegas as scheduled. He even reportedly turned his phone off so Gracie couldn't get a hold of him. This time it came with consequences. Diaz was pulled from the UFC 137 main event and Carlos Condit was immediately inserted in his place. St. Pierre, the innocent bystander and consumate company man in all of this, was caught off guard. He can't understand how Nick Diaz could be on the doorstep of accomplishing a dream and just throw it all away.

The worst part is (well, as a fan) that this announcement and bizarre turn of events has come on the heels of one of the craziest runs of big announcements (big in a positive way - the Diaz debacle is big in a negative way) we've ever seen MMA, much less the UFC. First it was the deal the UFC reached to broadcast their product on network television for the first time on Fox. Then it was the announcement that the first event on Fox would come on November 12th and would be headlined by the huge Cain Velasquez-Junior Dos Santos heavyweight title fight. It culminated yesterday with the announcement that not only had the UFC signed reigning Strikeforce heavyweight champion Alistair Overeem, but that his UFC debut would come against former heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar in the headliner of UFC 141 in December.

Don't get me wrong, compared to those announcements, having to replace Nick Diaz with Carlos Condit, a very worthy challenger in his own right, pales in comparison. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a troubling development. Nick Diaz hasn't just been pulled from a fight, he's likely out of a job. If you can't trust a fighter to show up for a press conference, how can you trust him to show up for a fight? Its all part of the job, and Nick Diaz didn't do his job. In MMA, the good news can't last forever. It balances out eventually. This was just a harsh reminder that despite the UFC being built around a brand instead of any one fighter, human beings are still at the heart of it. As they say, in MMA (*sigh*) anything can happen.