After an ugly back and forth with Dana White where the UFC President referred to him as a ‘POS,’ Nate Diaz’s manager says that his client isn’t close to returning to the organization.
Mike Kogan recently guested on Submission Radio and discussed a variety of topics, in addition to opening up about Nate Diaz’s chances of returning to the UFC.
“No, right now nobody’s talking to anybody,” Kogan said, answering whether Diaz would return just like his brother Nick recently has. “I mean, Dana made it very clear that Nate should be happy with what he has and he doesn’t see any reason to even discuss it, he’s not really as popular as I guess we believe he is, and that was that, we just kind of stopped there. So right now no, nobody’s talking to anybody.”
The manager also talked about how he has reached out to the UFC on several occasions about bringing Nate back into the fold and said that they didn’t seem to be interested.
“I reached out to the UFC before the Donald Cerrone/(Jim) Miller fight even happened and said ‘hey, how about we fight the winner? Nate beat both of them, they’ve both since fought 4 times and won, you know’, and they said ‘oh you know, let’s see how the guys are after the fight, maybe they’re banged up, maybe there not’. Next thing you know, they announce the fight with Khabib. Then Khabib blows his knee like 15 minutes later and now they’re saying he’s gonna be fighting Eddie Alvarez who’s not even signed with the UFC yet. And we asked for that fight when Michael Johnson got injured. We hit up the UFC and said ‘hey we’ll fight Thompson’. That was like 10 day notice, you know. We said maybe ask them if they’ll do like a little higher weight, like a catch-weight, you know like 160 or something, so it’s short notice. And they said ‘no, we have it figured out. Don’t worry about it’.”
Perhaps the most interesting part of the interview was when Kogan was asked about the comments that Dana White posted on Twitter about him a few weeks ago:
Kogan said that while wasn’t angry, it’s possible that White still might hold a grudge and that Diaz’s camp never wanted to make it a public situation.
“I doubt it, I mean I don’t know, I don’t hold grudges, it’s whatever,” Kogan said. “Dana probably holds grudges, he probably doesn’t really like me very much but what can I do? Nothing I can do about it. This thing, it wasn’t supposed to be played out in the media. I mean, we tried to have a private conversion a long time ago, and instead of having it, UFC started trashing Nate to media, saying he’s turning down fights, and he’s afraid, and this that and whatever, to which we responded.”
Kogan’s defense was that he was only reacting to the UFC’s stance that Diaz wasn’t drawing like other fighters do and that the manager was simply protecting his client.
“Go track down a single incident in which either Nate or I have said anything that was other than reactionary. Anything that was proactively said. Nothing. Not once. There’s never been an interview or an article where, you know we’re initiating a discussion with the UFC or over media as accreditation. Never, always been reactionary. Our first reaction was when he got accused of being scared of fighting Khabib (Nurmagomedov), and that’s not true. From there on, every time either one of us says anything it’s always as a reaction to something that’s already been said. It’s never been proactive,” Kogan said. “Now it’s like Jerry Springer. If you’re gonna be out there trashing my guy, then I’m gonna say something. I’m not just gonna be sitting back like ‘oh yeah you know, we’re so blessed to be breathing this air’.”
To read additional highlights from the interview, visit BloodyElbow.com
