Maycee Barber wants to be the one to show UFC flyweight Paige VanZant the door out of the UFC.
Paige VanZant’s UFC contract has only one fight remaining, and she has made it no secret that she has other options when it comes to making money. VanZant gained national fame from her appearance in season 22 of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars and also appeared in the 2019 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. VanZant has turned to modeling as a side gig, which includes pictures on Instagram that VanZant claims nets her more profit than her UFC career.
Maycee Barber has been calling for a fight against VanZant for some time now, and one of the reasons she cites for this desire is VanZant’s lack of gratitude for the promotion that gave her a platform in the first place (Transcript via MMA Junkie):
“Now she makes more money outside than she does in fighting because she’s not fighting,” Barber said in an interview with The Score. “As far as her last fight on her contract, that’s my fight. If she wants to fight in Bellator, if she wants to move out, she can fight me on her last fight on her contract, or she can never fight again, and that’s up to her.
“She would not be anywhere that she is right now without the UFC and what she’s done, and what they’ve given her, so she didn’t hold up her end of the bargain,” Barber continued. “When the UFC signed her, I think they saw someone who had very good marketability, and they thought could fight, and she’s not holding up her end of the deal. She’s not fighting. She’s not fighting anybody and she’s trying to duck all these girls – and she’s ducking me.”
Paige VanZant has already stated that she is not interested in fighting Maycee Barber because that would mean rewarding Barber for her disrespect. Barber believes VanZant’s comments to be a textbook example of faulty logic:
“She was kind of saying that there’s no story, but at the same time she made it a story,” Barber said. “I guess word for word, she said she didn’t want to reward me with a fight because I’m disrespectful. In my opinion, if someone disrespects me, and I don’t really like them, I kind of want to beat them up. However, she can’t beat me up, so her only excuse to not fight me is, ‘Oh, well, she’s disrespectful. I don’t want to fight her and reward her with a fight with me.’ So that’s her only excuse now that she has to not fight me.”
Do you believe Paige VanZant is behaving like an ingrate towards the UFC?
