When it comes to trash talk, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the line from the lions. I can remember sitting in the room when Tito Ortiz decided to tell a story while building up his fight with Chael Sonnen in 2017. It was like something from Masterpiece Theater. Had he been puffing a pipe and wearing his favorite slippers, I might’ve gathered around closer.
“It’s kind of funny, I was listening to Christopher Walken, the little skit he did, and he talked about the lion, king of the jungle,” Tito started out. “This huge lion with a big giant mane. In this hot smothering weather in Africa. And the little, small lions come up to kind of poke at him. Bit on his ear. Bit on his neck. The lioness comes over and bugs him.”
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(I imagined Amanda Nunes bothering this lion and got chills).
“Then you got the jackals and the rest of the wilderness looking, and seeing that lion on that mountaintop,” he continued. “And they come over and bother him, the jackals laugh at him. The hyenas laugh at him, nip at his toes. They eat all his food, and they sit back …”
(Here Sonnen began to snore, pretty loudly if we’re being completely honest, and I’ve come to believe he was faking sleep).
“…and you got jackals like this, and they think it’s a comedy. Until one day he gets sick of it, and he attacks. And he shows people who the king of the jungle is.”
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(This wasn’t the payoff I’d hoped for, but by the end, I understood that Tito saw himself as the lion).
“And this little hyena, I’m going to eat right through him. And we’ll see on Saturday night.”
(Eat right through him? Jesus.)
(I remember looking at promoter Scott Coker, who was in the middle of a text when Tito got to the end of the story)
The table was set for Sonnen-Ortiz.
Sean Strickland really will just say whatever.
(Jack Gorman via Getty Images)
The thing about Sean Strickland is that his humor is a little different. As in, there’s no real playfulness in what he’s saying. No unintentional comedy, as with Tito. None of the comedic one-liners that Sonnen had, nor the self-owning parody of Colby Covington. And if there’s a line, he throws himself over it as far as he can.
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I like to think that he is performing an experiment to see if the world is still genuinely capable of an emotional response, or — short of anything quite so well-meaning — that he’s trying to prove to his buddies that he can get by with whatever the hell he wants.
You know, like he nudges his coach Eric Nicksick and says, “Watch this, I’m going to toss out some casual misogyny, xenophobia, gay bashing, racism and then sprinkle in some Islamophobia and — just watch! — there will be plenty of people who will defend me.”
Whatever it is, there was real concern among UFC matchmakers early on that they might have trouble marketing a guy who told the world that he’d been a neo-Nazi in his youth who’d idolized the movie “American History X.” Once Strickland forced his way into a title shot against Israel Adesanya and won the crowd over in Australia by taking his title, the fanbase itself reconsidered its labels. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Maybe we were reading too much into his curb-stomping fetishes.
Maybe the guy who said it would make him “super happy” to kill an opponent in the Octagon’s biggest fault is simply that he overshares.
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What’s the big deal?
We have been in this Strickland whirlpool of slurs and violent soundbites for long enough to be immune to it by now, but we didn’t even make it to fight week before he turned his UFC 328 main event on May 9 into an indie snuff film. Or at least, until he introduced the idea of shooting Khamzat Chimaev.
While hosting a little Q&A at the UFC’s Performance Institute in Las Vegas, Strickland envisioned his first encounters with Khamzat next week in New Jersey, and let’s just say he wasn’t anticipating a cordial handshake.
“All I’m going to do, I’m going to pull my gun out and I’m going to shoot him,” he said. “If he were to come up to me like a man, say, ‘You know what Sean, you said some things about my dad, Kadyrov,’ I’m like, ‘You know what, dude? You whored yourself out, not me, I want to settle this.’ I would say let’s settle this like a man.
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“But if you come up to me with three f***ing goatf***ers — Chechnyans that don’t speak English — I’m going to pull my gun and I’m going to shoot each and every one of you. I’ll be strapped in New Jersey, too, don’t even worry about that.”
Khamzat Chimaev is a force of nature — but he isn’t bullet-proof.
(Geoff Stellfox via Getty Images)
As far as anyone knows, neither Khamzat, nor his traveling faction, has ever been involved in any romantic relationship with a goat. It’s doubtful that Strickland will roll up to the Garden State with a gun, either. Murder is as frowned upon on the East Coast as it is on the West. As with much of what Strickland says, his overboard sentiments feel more like nervous energy taking the form of wild talk, as the mics get hot.
There’s no telling what he’ll say next, but you can bet it’ll make you feel some kind of way.
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Perhaps it makes you feel like he can’t control his impulses, for one. What he has is a fight-game version of Tourette’s Syndrome, though I hate to involve the Tourette’s community in what Strickland does. He can control himself; he just doesn’t care to. That can be seen as admirable to some, to be so uninhibited, but what makes him compelling to a voyeuristic public is that he doesn’t consider the consequences of what he’s saying. In fact, he dares repercussions of any kind. When he talks about death, which is frequently enough, it doesn’t concern him.
Death to him is one of the things that’s such bulls*** about life.
Such an attitude, when it all leads to a fight, cannot help but play. But nobody is free from catching the strays of Strickland’s hypothetical gun that he’s smuggling into Newark. Poor Alex Pereira, who has nothing to do with anything going on with Strickland right now, was used as Exhibit A of the kind of foreigner whom Americans will accept.
“[The UFC finds] these sh***y people in Third World countries,” Strickland said. “We don’t accept you guys. We accepted Alex Pereira because he’s a f***ing American. Loves guns. Likes f***ing p***y, maybe a little too much.”
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That’s another thing. When Strickland talks about sex, which is more often than he talks about death, it commonly involves animals, homosexual encounters or single-track minds, like “Poatan’s.”
The real drama is what happens before the fight. Khamzat, much like Khabib Nurmagomedov, isn’t one to mess around with. What happens when they come face-to-face for real? It took everything in Khabib’s power to wait until after he’d settled things with Conor McGregor at UFC 229 before he talon-swooped down on Dillon Danis to settle some emotional debts.
Khamzat might not wait until fight night, and then the UFC would be stuck with a bigger problem. Not that Strickland is overly concerned with leaving Dana White in the lurch if there’s any jazz before the rumble.
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In fact, not even Dana was exempt from catching a Strickland stray.
“I’m sure Dana White is a sociopath,” he said, while standing right there in the UFC PI. “At that level, let’s be honest, at that level of what he’s accomplished, the s*** he deals with, I’m sure he’s a super-narcissistic sociopath. For him, the lizard brain doesn’t compute, so he’s like, f***ing bring it on dude, bring it on mother***er, which I respect. I respect that.”
Then he said Dana himself would get off on watching Strickland kill Chimaev in a fight.
“I think Dana White would love to watch that mother****er get killed. Again, he’s a sick f***, dude. I mean 100 percent; do we not think that about Dana White?”
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Here he flashed his dimples with a big smile. The one thing Strickland likes is approval, especially when he’s trying to get to the bottom of how he knows what we’re really feeling.
“The guy’s probably a sociopath, or even, he’s probably a psychopath.”
If there’s a line, Strickland will cross it. If there’s a lion, well … I like to think that in Tito Ortiz’s imaginary animal kingdom, Strickland is the hyena nipping at the lion’s toes.
