Was the Sean Strickland and Khamzat Chimaev rivalry real, or was this just the latest example of fighters putting on a show to sell a fight?
Leading up to UFC 328, the Strickland vs. Chimaev beef almost seemed too real. The way Strickland was talking, no one would be surprised if a fight week encounter ended with twenty angry Chechens storming a hotel and someone getting shot. The pre-fight press conference was endless obscenities followed by Khamzat kicking Sean in the balls. It certainly felt real.
But once the cage closed, the two fighters touched gloves and even embraced to start round five. When Strickland won an extremely close split decision, Chimaev put the belt around his waist. Strickland apologized in the cage for going too far with his trash talk. So did we ‘get got’ again?
Sean Strickland spoke at length about his relationship with Khamzat Chimaev during the UFC 328 post-fight press conference.
“I sell fights,” he said. “I mean, look at the UFC, how f–king boring it is. Like, really, the UFC is so f–king boring. I didn’t even know half the [fighters]. Other than Alex [Pereira], and Alex doesn’t even talk. He’s just big and scary. That guy just knocks everybody out. But other than Alex, it’s just f–king boring, dude.”
“I go f–king so hard, everybody. And there’s always truth to what I say. But at the end of the day, man, all the hate’s out of me. I need a hate battery charge, so I need a couple days.”
This isn’t the first time Strickland has gone hard pre-fight only to turn around and be the perfect sportsman in the cage with his opponent.
“Unless you’ve experienced it, you just don’t know what it’s like,” Strickland said. “When you go and fight another man, bro, your soul is just exposed. When you’re f–king bleeding and he’s bleeding and I wanna quit, he wants to quit. We don’t wanna be there. You just have this level of respect for one another that transcends race, religion, nationality, country … After, you kinda become someone’s brother after you and him try to die, win or lose.”
Strickland delved into the origin of his beef with Chimaev, but went so far as to suggest the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding.
“I don’t like to be threatened,” he said. “And maybe it’s just who he is as a person, but, when he was in the gym, he was really threatening. Like, he just had that threatening demeanor. And maybe it’s the little man inside me, but when you threaten me, I just wanna f–king murder you. I wanna kill you. And maybe he didn’t take it that way, maybe it’s just his Chechen sense of humor. But always in the gym, he would always try to punk me.”
“Maybe I could have manufactured the whole situation in my head, you guys, to be honest,” Strickland continued. “There’s times when you’re mentally not well, you’ll have interactions with people. And sometimes your brain thinks something else happened where you gotta sit back and go, ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ There’ll be times where I’ll have an interaction with somebody and, bro, it’s like my brain hallucinates the entire interaction. So there’s a chance that I just hallucinated that entire interaction.”
In the end, Sean seems cool with Khamzat now and Khamzat is cool with Sean.
“Like Chimaev said, I made him the most money he’s ever made on a fight,” Strickland concluded. “You’re welcome, Chimaev.”
