Was Nick Diaz implying that he got inside information on Scott Smith’s weaknesses from Smith’s teammates? That’s what he made it sound like after the fight:
Nick Diaz has suggested that his win over Scott Smith may be credited in part to “betrayal” on the part of Smith’s team mates.
Speaking after the fight, Diaz said of Smith. “I know his partners. They’re not loyal training partners. They’re not good friends to have. We’ve got a team twenty minutes down the road and I know everything they do.
“We work a lot harder than they do. I don’t like to talk bad about people I don’t know, but I know these guys,” he added.
Because Nick Diaz is generally a mumbler and half the things he says don’t seem to make any sense, I thought at the time he was just setting up his dickish invitation to “Come train with a REAL team”. It’s generally hard to tell when Nick is being serious and when he’s just being a dick … maybe this is true. And maybe he was just being a dick. Most likely he was being both. But it’s worth noting that just because Nick Diaz says something is true, it doesn’t always mean it is.
What’s the ethics of this anyways? In my opinion, fight espionage is cheating it takes two to tango. Obviously everyone scours over tapes and talks to former opponents, but accepting information from the teammates of the guy you’re currently about to fight just seems past cheap. No one else has really poked this story around, even on the forums, so it will be interesting to see what comes of it when the rest of the MMA sites pick it up.
UPDATE: I completely got this one wrong. Nick Diaz was just talking about how one of the guys cornering Smith used to be a friend and training partner of Nick’s back in the day:
“…and his partner too that used to train with us … helped like three guys train to fight me … supposed to be my friend I brought him into this sport I started him training and got him into this shit and then from one place to another trying to help people who are trying to beat me and then he goes and here he is cornering another fighter against me with Scott Smith. It never ends with these guys and they have no team unities and I don’t feel like they’re loyal friends to each other and that’s the ball game here, that’s the name of the game, it’s a team sport and you’re only as good as who you train with.”
Honestly, I must have been watching too much TUF lately assuming this story was a straight up training secrets betrayal. I read the line “We’ve got a team twenty minutes down the road and I know everything they do” to mean someone was squealing on Scott’s training down at Cesar Gracie’s. But knowing Nick Diaz, he was just implying his school was better. The former partner Diaz is referring to is Tim McKenzie, and you can read an interview with him at ProMMA.info that goes over the entire beef with Nick.
