STOCKTON, CALIFORNIA: Nate Diaz recently addressed and talked about his upcoming fight with Jake Paul and his reasons for leaving the UFC to do his own promoting.
In a recent interview with ESPN, The 38-year-old discussed the event's lead-up and what it's been like marketing his own fight under his recently established Real Fight Inc. promotional banner.
Nate Diaz discusses his fighting career
In order to give his own perspective on combat sports with complete freedom, Diaz founded his own promotional fight firm.
“Like I said before,” Diaz explained. “I’m doing stuff nobody’s ever done before. I think I’ve been doing that my whole career, so I plan on continuing for a long time.
He added, “I’ve had a lot of thoughts on the way things should go throughout my whole fight career, and people would put stops to it or say, ‘That’s not how it goes’ or something. And I was like, well, I need to be on my own then, and do my own thing.''
He went on saying, ''Because I like to make it, I like to run my show; it’s my show and I’m fighting on it, you know? So I think I have the experience and the time put in to call the shots on the way I think things should go. Because I like entertainment too in fights, and I know what I like to see.''
“I’m putting out a lot of ways on how to do things, if you actually watch. But I copy the book from people too. You know, I watched what was happening," Diaz continued.
“Golden Boy f**king did his own promotion, Mayweather did his own thing. And my brother did stuff, I saw Chael Sonnen do stuff, and people do stuff. And with martial arts, you’re gonna take the whole package and it’s the art itself," Diaz said.
He added, "Just the whole fight game. I know who people want to see fight, I know who I want to see fight, more so than other people."
Nate Diaz doesn't want to create hype for his fight with Jake Paul
When it comes to the fight's promotion, Diaz is more focused on sending Jake Paul a strong message than he is on bringing in spectators. He said, “I’m ready to go to war right now, and I’m ready to be cool until it’s time to have a fight."
He further explained, “I don’t care. I’m in an important point of my career where it’s like, I’m not trying to scare anybody, I’m not trying to fool anybody. If people want to watch, that’d be great. If they don’t, that’s fine too.”
“That’s where he( Jake Paul) got me twisted. I’m not in a gimmick fight with him. Man, I only need him to know that I’ll whoop his ass. I don’t need the whole world. I don’t need to go begging for people to watch. Don’t watch.”
The number of rounds that Diaz and Paul are expected to battle in their boxing match is the only issue about which he is controversial.
Although there was some disagreement online on how many of them they'd prefer to fight, Diaz asserted during the interview that “I don’t really care about the rounds. I’d rather have less rounds, but it’s just funny to see Jake Paul make a big deal over it anyway.”
“It was just funny because I was like, why do 8 rounds? Paul just fought 8 rounds a bunch of times, right? What’s the rules? I don’t really even know the rules for boxing," he said.
Diaz added, "If it was like, a championship, I think championship fights are 10 rounds and 12 rounds. 10 and 12. Yeah, I don’t know and I wasn’t sure. So I was like, well, let’s do more rounds. It was just a little thought I didn’t really care about.”
