UFC middleweight contender Chris Weidman, spoke to mmaweekly.com about his campaign to be the next man to fight champion Anderson Silva.
Weidman explains his frustration with Silva wanting to fight other fighters out of the weight class, and the fact that Silva and his management team don’t feel he deserves the fight.
“It’s like they’re trying to avoid my name being mentioned at all for the title shot. They’re trying to deflect with other guy’s names so people can start thinking about them as possibilities, but even guys they’re choosing to call out like GSP or (Nick) Diaz, they’re both welterweights.
The guy’s a champion of 185, he should be fighting the contenders. You don’t call out guys that aren’t going to be able to fight forever and guys that are lighter than you. Why don’t you call out Jon Jones? That makes sense, I’m sure a lot of people would watch, I’d love to watch too. If you’re not going to fight him, fight me, I’m ready to go.
Dana White’s the best promoter in the world and I have full confidence that he’d be able to promote the fight just fine. I’m undefeated, every time I’ve had a full camp I’ve finished my opponent. You’ve got Anderson Silva, the No. 1 guy in the UFC right now, and just him alone is fine, and it just makes no sense what he’s saying. The manager’s not showing enough faith in the UFC and Dana White in the way they can promote the fight.
I have nothing but respect for Anderson Silva, and I would expect him to want to fight the best guy and the guy who’s going to give him the toughest challenge. If it was up to him, I think he would want to fight me because I am the toughest challenge. But his managers I feel like they are trying to keep me away from it and try to make me irrelevant enough in the title picture with Anderson Silva.
If the UFC tells me 20 minutes from now that the Anderson Silva fight isn’t going to happen, and I need to fight someone else, I might be upset for a couple of minutes, but I’ll move on. I just feel like I’m the No. 1 contender right now and I feel like the champion should fight the No. 1 contender.
I feel like I’ve made it blatantly obvious with this last fight that I’m ahead of the pack. The champ should want to fight that guy.”
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