Under natten till söndag så gick The Ultimate Fighter 17-finalen av stapeln i Las Vegas. Några som fanns på plats var de båda coacherna Chael Sonnen och Jon Jones. Sonnen interagerade med fansen under galans gång när ett fan kallade till sig honom. Detta fan försökte attackera Sonnen men blev i sista stund stoppad av en vakt och skrikandes ivägsläpad av vakterna vilket Dana White berättade under gårdagens media scrum.
”Chael’s trash talk exploded with the Anderson Silva fight, when he started ripping him and Brazil. Last weekend, I don’t know if any of you guys saw or heard about this, but he was there, shaking hands with everybody and everything, and this guy says, ’Hey Chael! Chael! C’mon over here.’ Chael goes over there and the guy starts swinging on him, tried to punch him. Security bundled the guy up and dragged him out and he’s saying, ’Fuck you! You are a piece of shit! I’m from Brazil’ and all this other stuff. The guy attacked him at TUF 17 Finale last Saturday. It was a bad move for that guy, they didn’t take him out of there politely. He got bundled and dragged over every stair on the way out.”
Detta blev även bekräftat av Sonnen själv under natten då han blev intervjuad av MMAjunkie:
”It was very quick, like those things typically happen,” berättar Sonnen. ”I was visiting with some fans, and a gentleman had started in on me. Ultimately, that’s what it led to.
”I think a fan can do anything they want. I think they can heckle, a fan can boo, but they can’t touch you. But the same thing goes for me. I can yell at a fan too, but you can’t touch them. If you want to be a fan, you buy the ticket, and you can have any energy you want, whether it’s positive or negative. And in this case it was negative, and he went a little too far.”
”It was really quite interesting. He was caught literally a quarter-second before it would have landed. I barely saw it coming in before a gentleman named Kaya stepped in and caught it.”
”We only compete in highly regulated and sanctioned matches. I’m not a fan of that, but if he would have connected, I would have turned the other cheek and walked away. I certainly wouldn’t have engaged him.
”The guy seemed like a perfectly nice guy. He was an Anderson Silva fan. He was backing Anderson Silva verbally. For it to turn physical, yes, that was a surprise. But until that point, he just seemed like a guy with a passion for his favorite fighter.”
Efter allt som Sonnen sagt om Brasilien så kanske det inte var så konstigt att han skulle stöta på något upprört fan. Att det däremot skulle ske i Las Vegas var inte riktigt lika väntat. Sonnen har tidigare berättat att vid hans besök i Brasilien så har alla fans varit trevliga och respektfulla.
