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Nate Diaz
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On August 21, 2019 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Everybody Sucks, and Other Reasons to be Patient

Describing anything as patient is usually a backhanded compliment. Patience is a good thing, of course, but it’s also a common euphemism for boring. If a date describes you to their friends as “patient,” it probably doesn’t bode well for your romantic future. Nobody wants to watch a football team that plays a “patient” brand of offense, let alone a “patient” fight. Patience is fundamentally unsexy, as virtues tend to be. This is a cage fight; shoot all the just-bleed vices directly into my veins.

Yet UFC 241 on Saturday in Anaheim, California, gave us plenty of reason to appreciate the different ways in which patience can present itself in the fight business…

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On August 22, 2016 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Mixed Martial Artistry

“All great art is narrative in some way. Not that a piece of art needs to tell a story in order to be great, but what truly distinguishes something is its place in a larger context. While good art of any sort can be defined by the immediacy of its aesthetic, great art exists in narrative crosshairs that make it representative of something bigger than itself. It’s why classic paintings can capture a period of history as much as any account of facts or why our favorite songs tend to be the ones that bring us back to specific moments from our lives; they’re intertwined with the things going on around them in a fundamental, inseparable way.

By any metric, Nate Diaz-Conor McGregor 2 at UFC 202 on Saturday was great art. It was a perfect blend of what we love about this sport, and it couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time…”

 

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On August 19, 2016 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Conor McGregor vs. Nate Diaz Statistical Analysis

“The Ultimate Fighting Championship’s most marketable rivalry will finally get its second breath.

After a superlative 2015 campaign, the outspoken Conor McGregor entered his March showdown with Nate Diaz with an aura of destiny. At that point, McGregor was undefeated in the UFC and had not tasted defeat since an early career submission loss in 2010. After the Irishman tapped to a rear-naked choke from Diaz, the rematch was booked for UFC 200, but a maelstrom of drama surrounding press obligations and faux-retirement unfolded, pushing it back until now. This will be McGregor’s second fight above 145 pounds and his second fight of 2016.

On the other side of cage at UFC 202 on Saturday in Las Vegas will be longtime MMA antihero and cult favorite Diaz, who notched the most important win of his career when he throttled McGregor at UFC 196. Since then, he has become a bona fide star in the sport. The winner of “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 5 has nearly a decade of UFC fights under his belt, as well as stints in World Extreme Cagefighting and a one-off Strikeforce bout, making him a true veteran of the sport. Diaz is 3-3 in the UFC fighting above lightweight, and this will be his second fight of the year.

There are a lot of narrative and stylistic threads running through this fight, so let us see what the Tale of the Tape says…”

 

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On April 13, 2016 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Pedestals and PED’s

“I’m past the point of being surprised by PED busts in MMA. At this point, it seems that most of the sport’s heroes have at the very least dabbled with performance enhancers, and with the newly implemented random United States Anti-Doping Agency drug tests, I’d bet that only the staunchest clean-sport advocates have abstained; or to quote Nate Diaz: “They’re all on steroids.”

The problem is that random tests and stiffer penalties are not always effective deterrents. To those fighters who were on the fence about PEDs, perhaps they were dissuaded. However, the fighters who had built — or at least felt they had built — successful careers on a foundation of extralegal assistance, such impositions are only motivations to become smarter about cheating, including taking smarter legal precautions when necessary. If behavior management were as simple as “punish more and punish harder,” school classrooms and city streets would be a whole lot different…”

 

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On March 28, 2016 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Fairytale Championships

“In the aftermath of UFC 196, you can’t help but feel good to see the increased exposure of Nate Diaz. The Ultimate Fighting Championship veteran of nearly a decade has been a fan favorite since his days on “The Ultimate Fighter,” and while he has never exactly been graceful on the microphone, he has always been honest and interesting.

This was no less true when, earlier this week, the Stockton Slap specialist made an appearance on “UFC Tonight.” Sitting alongside fellow “Ultimate Fighter” alums Kenny Florian and Michael Bisping, Diaz detailed his comfort with being a moneyweight fighter simply looking for the biggest possible fights. When asked whether those fights would be for a title, Diaz brushed it off in a vintage soundbyte: “I think that title thing’s a fairytale, man.”

First off, you have to love the fact that Diaz said that to Florian, who had three failed attempts to win a UFC title, and Bisping, who has always knocked at the championship door but has never been invited inside to try his hand. Yet Diaz knows what he’s talking about; once upon a time he, too, had a title shot, and he was handily defeated by Benson Henderson. Diaz made $50,000 for that fight, half of what he made in his next four fights combined. Against Conor McGregor, he earned more than four times the amount of those five fights put together. There was no title or title shot on the line…”

 

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