[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 11, 2018, 11:03 AM]
With UFC 223 having concluded, the fallout of the Conor McGregor saga continues. With ample of figures throughout the sport sharing their views, UFC lightweight Kevin Lee recently offered his thoughts.
“I think you do have to blame some of the media for blowing the dude’s head up, and he just feel like his s*** don’t stink,” Lee said. “I think a lot of what you see is frustration. I think he knows he ain’t been the champ for a while. He don’t know what else to do. He’s acting like a child. It’s retarded. I ain’t going to give that cokehead too much press.”
Kevin Lee, who meets Edson Barbosa next month is known for his outspoken nature.
Dana White recently stated that the actions of McGregor were a retaliation that “had to be done” following Khabib’s attack on McGregor’s friend and teammate, Artem Lobov. Lee, however, doesn’t believe any of it.
“That’s just the fight game,” Lee said. “What Khabib did I didn’t feel was disrespectful. I didn’t see nothing out of line. And if it was out of line that’s not the way to go about it. I think Conor, he wants to be this gangster, he wants to be this thug, but he ain’t really from there. If it’s me, I got in this game to get away from that, to get away from having to do (expletive) like it. It seems like he is trying to get there and then he’s going back to where I came from it. It’s backwards to me. It don’t really make sense.
“You can tell the man don’t know what he’s doing, because when you have that type of money, you ain’t supposed to throw (expletive). You supposed to be out somewhere holding up a newspaper in front of cameras: ‘I ain’t nowhere near the scene. But somebody will get touched.’ That whole situation is laughable. It’s laughable to someone like me, and I hate giving it press really.”
Alongside McGregor being a rival in the same weight class, one of the victims of the fallout was a former opponent of Kevin Lee, Michael Chiesa, who was forced to pull-out due to a laceration from shattered glass.
“I feel bad for the dude,” Lee said. “I really do. I wish it had been me on that bus. We would have caused a riot in that S***. There ain’t no way they would have held me on that bus. I feel bad for a guy like Mike. Mike don’t want to hurt a fly. He should stop showing up for media stuff. He just keep getting hit in the head. If I was the UFC, I would just stop scheduling the dude to do media. It ain’t working out too good for him.”
“It’s dangerous to start drinking that Kool-Aid in all senses of it,” Lee said. “In the fight sense, I think the man knows he’s not the real champ. He doesn’t stack up well against us big three. You’ve got Khabib, you’ve got Tony (Ferguson), and you’ve got me. He’s going to lose to all three of us. So there’s that frustration. Then the man, he’s not a real gangster. Yeah, he might have grew up poor, but they working class. They ain’t really street people. He want to be from the streets so bad that it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to play around with that. I know it just cause I’ve seen it, and I know people that are real in it. You play around with them folks, you can’t do that for too long. They don’t give a S*** about your money. I know a lot of dudes that don’t.
“We’ll see how it shakes out. I wish him nothing but the best. I hope nothing bad on the man. I wish him the best. I wish he can turn it around, and I’m looking to make some money with him. There’s some fights to be made.”
