Fighters formed a queue - not an orderly one - to face Conor McGregor once Rafael dos Anjos withdrew from UFC 196.
It was with good reason too: the massive pay day which comes with facing the Irishman.
Dana White told ESPN Radio on Tuesday that Diaz had earned 'millions' from the fight. McGregor himself made $10 million-plus.
To get the fight, Nate Diaz needed to tell Dana White a white lie.
During commentary for UFC 196, both Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan mentioned several times that Diaz was in training for a triathlon when he got the call to replace dos Anjos. This is what Diaz had told White when asked if he was in shape.
In fact, he was sitting on a Yacht in Mexico at the time.
Speaking to MMAJunkie, Diaz's conditioning coach Damian Gonzalez explained what happened.
I think that he told Dana that really just to put them at ease, like, ‘Yeah, we’re in shape. He can’t tell Dana, ‘I’m sitting here on the beach having a cocktail.’ You just can’t say that.
So you can look at it that way – he needs to recover from his last fight so he can start training again and triathlon season is coming. So technically, yeah, but not exactly the way everybody spun it.
That Diaz took the fight on 11 days' notice was one of the main factors for McGregor being hot favourite to win. There was real concern within the Diaz camp that the 30-year-old, despite having told Dana White otherwise, did not have the required levels of fitness.
I was worried. He was worried. Everybody was concerned about his conditioning, especially the people around him.
Some fitness tests later and concerns had been alleviated.
The brief time to prepare meant Diaz and his team had to be smart with their limited number of sessions.
He was going to cram in a lot of work in short time, but he needed to recover from it. Basically what we were doing was shorter workouts, but a lot of workouts throughout the day, doing short duration.
But the volume was pretty high, with a lot of intensity and a lot of recovery. They can’t take any illegal supplements; they’re not really into all that stuff, so basically, it’s just, when you’re not working out, you’re recovering.
Picture credit: Mark J. Rebilas / SPORTSFILE
