Honesty is the best policy, unless you want a shot at glory.
At least that’s the tactic employed by Nate Diaz in order to secure his fight with Conor McGregor at UFC 196.
The Californian as already admitted that he was totally unprepared for a fight when he got the call from Dan White, asking him to step in for the injured Rafael dos Anjos.
The admission confused a lot of people as we had been told that Diaz had kept in shape by preparing for a triathlon, so he was ready to go when RDA dropped out.
We now know that Diaz was sitting on a yacht in Mexico, drinking with his friends and not training for anything. So where did the story come from?
Well, it turns out it came from Nate Diaz himself, who apparently told Dana White a little white lie to make it seems like he was ready to fight McGregor.
Damian Gonzalez, Diaz’s conditioning, coach explained the decision to MMAJunkie, saying: “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.”
Diaz then employed an extreme ten-day programme to be fit for the fight. And the rest, they say, is history.
