If you had been following the UFC 189 World Tour of press conferences, and of course the fantastic UFC embedded series around it, then you will no doubt be familiar with the man sitting to the left of Jose Aldo in this picture:
That is Saul Almeida, the translator for Jose Aldo who became famous for giving death stares to Conor McGregor in cities all over the World, and most of the Dublin crowd at the event in the convention centre.
Well Saul has finally spoken up, in a fantastic interview with Chuck Mindenhall for MMAfightting.com, the man with the menacing moustache has admitted that Conor McGregor's antics in Dublin made him want to have a swing at The Notorious one:
I wanted to go and slap Conor myself, maybe one day. When he snatched [Aldo’s] belt [in Dublin] I should have been quicker. When he went for it, I should have grabbed it and kept it.
Almeida is a fighter himself, and he has an upcoming fight in the World Series Of Fighting which he was training for while on tour with Aldo, but he also revealed that his job of translator didn't mean he had to convey everything that the fans and McGregor were saying:
Some things I didn’t translate to him, I didn’t pass it down. I told him the important stuff. When somebody is yelling, ‘Hey Aldo, I got something for you…you’re a b*tch, you’re a p*ssy,’ I’m not going to turn to him and tell him that. That’s the greatest featherweight of all time. You can’t be disrespectful like that. He doesn’t know what they’re saying, so I just don’t pass it down. He would tell me what he wanted to get across, what he wanted to say and I would. That’s it.
So there you have it, not all of the carefully planned and well thought out questions on offer from the Dublin crowd will have had their full impact.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
