One of this week’s true oddities occurred on Thursday when former UFC heavyweight champion Fabricio Werdum sized up against lightweight contender Tony Ferguson
Both men were in attendance of a UFC 216 media lunch when Ferguson told Werdum to ‘shut up’ in Spanish, setting the Brazilian off.
It took UFC PR man Chris Costello to intervene to calm tensions between the two men. Werdum and Ferguson exchanged slurs (some of a homophobic nature) in Spanish and Portuguese before being separated by Costello.
“I just don’t punch him because I know he’s got a fight coming up and Chris is a very nice guy with me all the time,” Werdum said afterward during the lunch (via MMAFighting). “I don’t want to break everything. I almost, maybe just like one second, I snap his head — 100 percent. Like PRIDE rules.”
Ferguson, on the other hand, had said that he did not want to be sat near Werdum. The 40-year-old, who shares the same manager as Ferguson’s rival Khabib Numragomedov, was accused by “El Cucuy” of being ‘rude’ and of having a generally negative presence:
“I don’t want to be around people that bring me down,” Ferguson said. “This is my shit, man. This is my f*cking time. Don’t talk over me. Because when you were in that spot, I gave you the time and the energy for it. I let you be. Don’t be rude. It’s just rude, man.”
