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Nick Diaz gets a top ESPN headline… for not apparently paying his taxes
By Zach Arnold | March 17, 2013
Nick Diaz, after loss, says he doesn’t pay taxes, jail probable
Words can’t describe this short interview, so maybe some quotes will.
“I could have had a better training camp.”
“Nobody had faith in me to win this fight. I think I could have stopped the takedowns, I think I could have got the takedowns, come to think of it.”
He talked a lot about “the Canada thing” screwing up his sleep patterns and how he slept until 8 PM.
“I was just moving real slow.”
“I’d like a re-match, you know?”
Nick then went on to … blame?… Jeff Sherwood (Sherdog) for taking some photos of him catching ‘fools’ in knee-bars. Diaz says he thought he could show-off that submission roll in his GSP fight, but no luck because apparently the world saw all those Sherdog photos including GSP and fight strategy changed.
“I’m trying to retire, I’m trying to get out of this gig.”
“I’m not hurt. He hits like a woman, you know? He has a full-on range to separate and punch me but he hits like a girl because he’s too scared to let go far enough to get a real punch in because I’ll get up and he’ll have to fight and move around.”
“He fought all those wrestlers and he was going to wrestle them down. Once he takes them down, they don’t know what to do. They just sit there, they don’t get up.”
“You could say I don’t want to retire if I get a re-match, but if I don’t get a re-match who am I going to fight? I’m not going to fight any of these guys out here. I’ve done everything I’ve set out to do in fighting. I don’t want to jump around with these new kids. I don’t think Georges wants to fight Anderson Silva, I really don’t think he does.”
“Johny Hendricks is probably going to get worked (by GSP).”
“To be honest, this isn’t that upsetting to me.”
UFC 158 St-Pierre vs. Diaz inside the box score and by the numbers
Topics: Canada, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 37 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Diaz is a mess. Way too passive on his feet rounds 4 and 5 when he needed to finish; good enough on his back to prevent much ground damage but never a submission threat; full of really lame excuses in a sport where guys regularly fight with serious injuries or short notice.
Diaz brothers have been solved. It’s over.
Okay, so he doesn’t say the words of an educated man, though I see no reason to presume just because he didn’t finish high school that he is stupid, and poverty is Sacramento. Though I would like to know who the great speakers are in fighting or expressing their words of gracious defeat. I believe Dan Henderson and Randy Couture are two that are well spoken and great fighters, even Tank Abbott is a good speaker, but I don’t want to be wasting to much time on that.
Both Diaz Brothers bring a fight to every match and are two of the most dangerous fighters out there, whether win or lose, well, so is Dan Henderson, point being, no one should ever count them out or expect GSP to not hold his belt like Linus does his blanket…I think that he won fair and square, and fought good fight, but if and when he gets knocked out again then he may learn to throw hands of stone…
His not graduating high school has nothing to do with people calling him dumb. His habit of being scatterbrained and halting in interviews makes him come off dumb to some people. Although when he’s fired up (like in the GSP pressers or various YouTube rants he did in Strikeforce on fighters) he didn’t have these problems. So maybe he’s just a nervous public speaker unless motivated.
As for the proper losing speech, there really isn’t one beyond a quick congratulations and quickly ending the interview, since everybody hates losing (except the late Giant Ochiai at PRIDE 10.) But Nick’s interviews were “Excuse, excuse excuse….I’m not making an excuse. I’m retiring, I’m not retiring, but I might retire if all I get to fight are young guys. My training was great, I wasn’t trained enough. GSP is a great fighter, but he can’t and doesn’t want a real fight. I want to fight, but only money matches with GSP and Silva even though I just lost my second fight in a row.” I see no defense of that.
Sacramento, Stockton…two different areas really. And yes both have alot of uneducated people who quit school. He has had plenty of time to get a GED and finish.
Half of me laughs at all of the crazy stuff he says.
Half of me cringes at how stupid he really is.
He can’t keep a thought for more then a sentence or two before his brain moves onto something else. I never realized he didn’t graduate high school, but it certainly makes sense. He is the poster child for why a proper education is so important.
He really needs to surround himself with better people. I think Gracie is a bad influence on him.
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He complained about wanting Pride rules and judging. Under Pride rules his turtle position would have gotten him KO’d. And under no judging criteria in all of MMA’s history would he have won that fight. GSP got the better of the striking and the grappling.
I have noticed a trend of people saying they wish there was Pride judging and how takedowns count for too much. I saw a lot of those complaints on the Condit/Hendricks fight and some on the GSP/Diaz fight. Some fans actually don’t want takedowns to count at all. It is absolutely insane. A takedown is a very hard thing to do. It certainly deserves some credit during a fight.
There is no reason guys like Diaz and Condit should be so easy to takedown during a fight. At least Condit said during the post fight press conference that he knows he needs to improve his wrestling and it is the main reason he lost his last two fights.
Diaz on the other hand still seems to be in denial about it.
I typically score takedowns in MMA like they do in wrestling…. A takedown is worth 2 points, a reversal is worth 2 points, and an escape is worth 1 point.
So if one fighter gets two takedowns…. And his opponent escapes 2 times and then gets one takedown of his own at the end of the round…. It would be 4-4 and would be a tie. Of course there are no points assigned in MMA, but it is an easy way to determine who had some of the wrestling edge during each round.
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Interesting Nick Diaz fact….
He has an overall record (according to Sherdog) of 26-9.
His record outside the UFC is 19-3. And he has avenged 2 of those losses.
His record in the UFC is 7-6.
He is another one of those guys…. In a long long list of them…. Who is stellar outside of the UFC…. And is marginal within the octagon.
He is another one of those guys…. In a long long list of them…. Who is stellar outside of the UFC…. And is marginal within the octagon.
Shouldn’t that be the case with 95% of UFC competitors? Or are you seeking fighters to be signed from outside the UFC who aren’t stellar in second/third rate MMA events?
He is talked about like some great fighter. Has gotten title shots in the last year. But in reality he is just subpar.
Subpar MMA fighters have a winning record in the UFC while consistently taking high level fights?
He is absolutely an average fighter by UFC standards.
He never had to fight his biggest weakness in SF (wrestlers) and when he came to the UFC they didn’t even throw a wrestler at him until 3 fights in.
THere are 15 guys in the UFC and one in Bellator that would beat him.
If Zuffa really wanted to they could have him lose 4 to 5 in a row by just giving him guys with good takedowns. Heck even his striking isnt that good.
“par” is generally defined as an “average” – to say he’s “subpar” is to say he is below average. Below average guys don’t beat up BJ Penn. He’s a little better than that.
BJ Penn is washed up.
Diaz against Top 10 guys…. Saying he is sub par…. Was me putting it nicely. He is already 0-2 against them. And if he fights MacDonald next like I think he should…. He will be 0-3.
I think the point he is making is that Nick is perceived as one of the elite 5%, not as part of the 95%. That perception is wrong.
Nick and Nate are both fantastic brawlers who can box a guy up or choke him out with a gogoplata, but they are very beatable if you don’t brawl with them. They are easy marks for guys who can stick-and-move on the feet or wrestle on the mat. When they face guys who can do both (like Bendo and GSP), they are screwed.
Nick lost to GSP (which everyone does) and a very close decision to Carlos Condit. I don’t know how if he’s elite or not, but I wouldn’t use as evidence his losses to those two.
Who is arguing he’s in the top 5% though? It is a strawman argument.
A lot of fans have said he is Top 3 in the world for the last 2 or 3 years. When in reality he is borderline Top 10 at best. He doesnt even have any legit top 10 wins in the last 5 years.
People only had him top 3 if they were the type to rank champions just because they were champions. I do not recall seeing him ranked top 3 at the major places. And the ones that did were the types who kept a guy like Koscheck top 5 years after he was relevant just based on his past record and not divisional relevance. So your beef should be with their system and not Diaz.
I’ll go with Sherdog as the example:
Wasn’t ranked top 10 in 2009.
Ranked #9 in 2010 (22-7-1 record)
Ranked #5 in 2011 (25-7-1 record)
Ranked #4 in 2012 (26-8-1 record), fought in UFC that year.
I can see that people might have said that he was top 3 briefly after the fight with Penn where he beat a guy that was generally top 5 or so in the rankings. But for 2-3 years consecutively? Sounds like you’re fighting windmills.
BJ Penn was never a Top 5 guy in anything that was a respectable ranking.
Since the start of 2006, BJ Penn had exactly ONE win at Welterweight… And that was against a washed out Matt Hughes.
Nick Diaz really has not beaten a legit Top 10 Welterweight still….
Penn was almost universally cited as a top 5-10 welterweight after the Fitch fight, so, yeah. No.
I don’t give two sh!ts what is universally shown. The MMA Media has shown to be incompetent for a long long time.
Just like how right now…. Take the MMA Junkie rankings.
They have Diaz at #5 still. And they have Askren ranked above Fitch. And they have Koscheck ranked and Lawler isn’t. WTF!!
These rankings are a joke. Penn had no business being in the Top 10 before…. And Diaz has no business in the Top 10 right now.
But the great thing is that the proof is in the pudding…. These guys can rank these Strikeforce Champions as high as they want…. But the results are…. 5-6 in the UFC overall and 0-3 in title fights.
These guys are below .500 fighters combined in the UFC. They aren’t being given easy fights like the lower level Strikeforce guys.
Put Diaz against Maia and then MacDonald…. He will lose both…. And I bet he will still be ranked in the Top 10…. Despite going 0-4 agaisnt Top 10 guys and having no real Top 10 victory.
Looking at the SBN consensu rankings in March of 2011 when they were bought out Hendo was #8, Overeem was #7, Bigfoot #5, Werdum was #2, and Diaz was #7.Looking at who they’ve faced and their records since I would say they were pretty accurately ranked.
Penn shouldn’t have been #1, or even top 5, after beating Matt Hughes for the Welterweight title when Hughes was #1?
BJ was a top 5 fighter in the UFC after drawing with Fitch, and stopping Hughes who was on a three fight win streak.
Under Pride rules, GSP would win by TKO every fight.
This is the info that comes up in the RSS feed for this post. Come on Zach, you’re better than this stupid stuff:
“The IRS is looking for money to fund President Obama’s new health-care law and Nick Diaz just served up a big target to collect some cash.”
Diaz is a moron. Yes, it was Sherdog posting images of kneebar rolls that derailed him not the fact that anyone that trained any sort of BJJ would know the logical maneuvering that would set such a move up. Diaz is a terrible fighter. He can beat terrible strikers with no technique by using his slap punching garbage to frustrate and throw them off but everyone has known since the SF days that if they threw a wrestler in there with him, he was doomed. And of course as soon as they did, they showed why he was a subpar fighter at best. A big fish in a pathetically small pond.
I don’t think he offers much at this point in terms of a challenge for the top guys at Welterweight. I think pretty much everyone in the Top 10 would tool him pretty badly.
But it doesn’t sound like it will matter much anyway if he’s so stupid that he doesn’t pay taxes. Just a total idiot.
As someone who has been self-employed for most of my life, I kind of find the idea of health care for everyone to be a good goal to attain. It’s a feeling of insecurity when you don’t have it.
The new health care law has the IRS using its taxing power to collect revenue to find the new law. Hence the reference given Nick claims he’s never paid taxes and Uncle Sam likes to collect revenue. If Nick wants to be pay up in the future, I’m sure a few people will be glad to have their health care paid for. 🙂
Maybe when Nick gets suspended again, he can be the Sandra Fluke of getting medical marijuana paid for by insurance.
One other thing..
I think we have to call into question the entire legacy of the Diaz brothers. Both of them are mid-level talents at best. Able to take on strikers who lack any serious ground game but not able to truly excel in the upper echelon of talent in their divisions. People talk about both of them like they have some killer BJJ to go with their slap punch boxing. However neither has really been able to display any of that against anybody with a competent ground game and wrestlers make them look like they don’t even belong in the UFC at all.
It seems to me all the Diaz brothers are really good at is whining a lot and causing enough trouble to get themselves fights they haven’t earned.
I agree that most people over-rate the Diaz brothers as elite talents, but you are under-rating them just as badly.
Takanori Gomi, Paul Daley, Donald Cerrone, BJ Penn, Melvin Guillard, KJ Noons, etc. are all upper echelon strikers in MMA who were outstruck by a Diaz brother. They don’t just beat ‘terrible strikers with no technique’. They beat just about anyone, including very good strikers, who is dumb enough to engage with them in a boxing-range brawl.
As far as grappling goes, I agree that Nick’s submission game is over-rated simply because he rarely uses it. He’s got the skills, but he has zero desire to use them. Nate OTOH has both the skills and the desire to use them. He has submitted a laundry list of very competent ground guys (Jim Miller, Kurt Pelligrino, Junior Assuncao, etc).
The Diaz brothers are the best brawlers in the business, and Nate is one of the most dangerous guys off his back. Their weaknesses are their exaggerated boxing stance, plodding footwork, and lousy wrestling. Fighters who have the skills to take advantage of those weaknesses and the discipline to avoid being sucked into a brawl can give them fits, but fighters like that are few and far between.
I believe Nate is better than Nick but the guys you mentioned him submitting sort of make my argument for me. I said that the Diaz brothers are mid-level at best. Those submissions you touted were against mid-level guys who haven’t seriously competed for a title. And there are a lot more guys who have the discipline not to stand and trade with them in UFC which is why Nick in particular has looked rather pedestrian. Paul Daley, KJ Noons, a way past his prime Frank Shamrock, Scott Smith (fights with his heart, not his head and is not exceptionally skilled)… hell all of Nick’s Strikeforce foes were notably not skilled on the ground and worse than mid-level fighters at that point in their career.
Penn is also washed up. Guillard being included here is funny since the dude has no chin.
I just don’t find the list of fighters they beat to be uber-impressive. They’re talked about like they’re elite but they’ve beaten low to mid-level fighters and Nick in particular has only beaten strikers with no ground game.
“I said that the Diaz brothers are mid-level at best”
No, that is not what you said at all. You said …
“Diaz is a terrible fighter”
I personally wouldn’t call them mid-level (I think they are at the bottom of the elite level), but I can see the argument for them being the cream of the mid-level crop. IMO, there aren’t too many guys with the skills to beat them and the mental discipline to stick to a gameplan for 15-25 minutes while being called a bitch and openly mocked in the cage. Most fighters wind up saying ‘fuck it’ after a while and decide to try and take their heads off, playing right into the Diaz’s game.
Here’s the exact quote: “I think we have to call into question the entire legacy of the Diaz brothers. Both of them are mid-level talents at best.” Look up at the post you replied to.
Hard to be successful when you’re always the victim.
The UFC offered up another turd on a plate for mass consumption and now we get the two females coaching in a co-ed edition of the TUF. The UFC is becoming a clown show!!
I really don’t understand the uproar in some quarters about co-ed TUF. Every reality show on TV is co-ed. Co-ed is the norm. TUF was the outlier. Why is such a major issue for some people that TUF is moving towards the norm for it’s genre?
Because it’s going to make a dumb show even dumber. Granted, so many MMA fighters come off as socially awkward, so they may live in their house like it’s a middle school dance with the girls on one side and the boys on the otherside of the room. But there’s a threat of it turning into “Okay, female fighter, go be our secret agent and get the male fighter our teammate is fighting worked up thinking you’re into him so he doesn’t concentrate on our fight.” From the same show that said “You cannot contact your family under any circumstances but death because fighters can’t be distracted.” And if that doesn’t draw ratings, FOX will get Gordon Ramsay to host it.
Nick Diaz is bipolar or otherwise emotionally disturbed.