Welterweight contender Joaquin Buckley has seemingly gone on a quest to make himself as unlikeable as possible. First after an impressive win over Ruziboev he made the bizarre choice to call out Conor McGregor. This made absolutely no sense as in what world would Conor McGregor fight Joaquin Buckley. After this Daniel Cormier correctly mentioned how the call out was pointless and Buckley proceded to insult him on twitter. DC also returned with a tweet of his own reiterating that the call out was dumb. Now he claims Alex Pereira is causing detriment to MMA.
Buckley’s Rant
In an interview with Parry Punch Buckley voiced his concerns. Buckley said, “No disrespect to Alex Pereira because I’m a fan of that motherf*cker right now, that sh*t is crazy what he’s doing, but it’s still like, how is he able to do that? It makes (MMA) look stupid and reta*ded”. The implication being that Alex’s rise makes the sport look bad given his kickboxing background and how easily he has risen through the UFC.
In a sense he’s not entirely wrong but also he is wrong. It’s more of a testament to how great Alex is and the matchups he’s had which have allowed for his quick rise. Also, Alex isn’t the only example of this the sport is full of people who started training MMA late and have risen to the top. Examples include Volkanovski, Lesnar, Romero, Adesanya, Cro Cop etc who initially did one sport then transferred to MMA.
Buckley continued saying, ““You’ve got guys now from different professions that are like ‘Ah yeah I can do that sh*t’ and become the UFC champion too, it shouldn’t be like that. I’m not taking away from Alex Pereira, he might be working his ass off every motherf*cking day to get there. But, when you have someone that has solely trained MMA in itself and his whole goal as he got started in combat was to be a UFC fighter but then you’ve got another guy who’s coming over transitioning from a different sport still able to beat you, that’s a problem. I don’t think a lot of guys are applying themselves like they should”.
What’s Buckley Getting At?
This is a very strange argument from Buckley. He seems to be complaining about people from other sports transitioning and having success which is just a skill issue really. Although he could also be complaining about the level of skill in MMA fighters and how it should be higher. But, as I said earlier this isn’t new a lot of MMA fighters are fighters who transferred to MMA from a different sport.
Many of the greats started in a different sport and transferred to MMA and had success. This really isn’t something new that’s all of a sudden happened. The speed of how quickly Alex has managed to do it is unique but others have had similar rises. One example being Brock Lesnar who quickly rose in the UFC and acquired a belt.
This is very random from Buckley and just seems like a way to get attention. Granted it is working but what would be better is fighting. Buckley has gotten on a winning streak at welterweight so should look to keep that going. A match up with Stephen Thompson would be fun. We shall see what’s next for Joaquin Buckley and who he’ll fight next.
Featured image credits to Embed from Getty Images
