Ariel Helwani has a remarkably informative interview with Nick Diaz’s trainer, Cesar Gracie, that lends some insight into this whole remarkable mess of UFC 137. Some key quotes lifted from a really strong article by Helwani:
— “I told Dana [White] he was right to have done that.”
— “There’s a lot of hard workers I see that have trouble putting food on the table for their kids, I’ve stuck up for Nick a lot, but I can’t stick up for him on this one.”
Gracie claimed he last spoke to Diaz Tuesday, which is when Diaz informed him that he couldn’t find his passport and was not going to be able to fly to Toronto. The UFC excused Diaz for missing Toronto on the condition he made it to Las Vegas.
— “I would have driven him to Vegas if it came to that. I don’t care. He just turned his phone off and acted like a little kid. It just doesn’t cut it.”
— “Nick is like family to me. We’re going to have a long discussion, hopefully with Dana, to see if he’s still in the UFC or not. But let’s face it, Nick is 28 years old. I talked to Dana about this before, and I think a big problem with all of this is Nick has social anxiety. He doesn’t like to go and be away from home. He has no trouble fighting in the cage, though. You can’t just not show up and tell anyone anything.”
— “He doesn’t feel comfortable being around people,” he said. “He has a very deep ingrained social anxiety, and it’s something he probably needs help for, I think. I think that’s why he self-medicates himself with the marijuana. That’s my amateur opinion.
— “He did the same crap with Paul Daley and a couple other guys. It was the same Nick Diaz. It’s not the pressure of fighting GSP. It’s the pressure of doing a news conference before the fight. Fighting is no pressure because he gets to beat someone up or get beat up.”
— “I’ve always been there to facilitate things for him and stuck up for him even when he was wrong. If I were him, I would be calling Dana at some point basically begging for my job and giving [me] another chance to fight for the title.”
