Andrew Ravens
Ariel Helwani has issued a serious warning about the build to Sean Strickland vs. Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 328 on May 9, placing the trash talk between the two in a category reserved for the most heated feuds in MMA history and sharing genuine concern that the situation could spiral before fight night even arrives.
Speaking on the Ariel Helwani Show, Helwani drew a direct line between the current feud and a short list of feuds where the personal nature of the exchanges crossed into uncomfortable territory.
“I believe that there have been three fights, maybe four, max, where the trash talk has gotten so personal that it’s sort of uncomfortable for some to digest,” Helwani said. “The first one, you can make the case Chael Sonnen vs. Anderson Silva. The second one, you can make the case Conor McGregor vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov. The third one, which is the one that I’m sort of like saying maybe, maybe not, but I think you could put it in that category, was Colby Covington vs. Kamaru Usman.
“This would be the fourth. And I would say not since Khabib have we seen trash talk that, like, talked about religion, ethnicities, things of that nature, and so when he’s talking about these things, he’s saying these things to a guy who, like, doesn’t mess around, he doesn’t mess around,” he added. “… I just hope that they are truly ready for something very bad to happen next week. And what I mean by very bad — obviously, I’m not talking about like a death, or someone gets shot. Like this could get so inflammatory that the fight gets called off, like there’s a brawl.”
The comments Helwani was referencing came from a media scrum ahead of UFC 328, where Strickland escalated his ongoing verbal assault on Chimaev in characteristically provocative fashion. Strickland opened by addressing Chimaev’s suggestion that he would expect Strickland to run away if confronted before the fight.
“All I’m going to do, is I’m going to pull my gun and shoot him,” Strickland said at the scrum.
Strickland’s track record in the build-to-fights has established a pattern that makes Helwani’s concern easy to understand. In the lead-up to his UFC 297 bout against Dricus Du Plessis in Toronto, Strickland sent Du Plessis a direct message threatening to kill him. The comments caused controversy at the time but did not result in any action from the UFC.
