TAHOE CITY, Calif. – He’d wake up starving. Literally. A three-, four-hour workout the night before – jiu-jitsu, boxing, wrestling, whatever – would be followed by no food, just water and a fitful sleep, stomach screaming for substance.
When he’d wake, a body crying in pain. He’d climb out of bed, toss on some running shoes and hit the road … two, four, six, eight (miles). Maybe 10, maybe whatever was needed. Only then could he get breakfast: a couple egg whites and a tiny bowl of cereal that would satiate nothing.
Nate Diaz would be cutting weight, always, it seemed. The scale loomed over everything. He was the UFC’s Swiss Army knife – lightweight, welterweight, catch-weight. Need a guy to fight, on notices short or long, at this weight or that?
Diaz was ready to punish his body in ways that not even stepping into a cage could match. He was 6-foot-1, fighting at 155 pounds, fighting for a chance for bigger bouts and bigger checks.
That’s the job though and Nate Diaz never shied away from that – except across all those tortuous weight cuts, when he found the time to think clearly about how the business of mixed martial arts works under the umbrella of a take-or-leave-it promotion like the UFC.
And it drove the fury that now, with his star turn arriving following his March victory over Conor McGregor at UFC 198 and in advance of their August rematch at UFC 202, has Diaz looking to challenge everything.
“They better hope I don’t win this fight,” Diaz said of the UFC. “Because it’s going to be a lot of trouble for everybody, in terms of the business. This one coming up, they better hope I don’t win this one because the game is going to change.
“It already has.”
It’s well past midnight on a late June night and Nate Diaz is pacing around the living room of a house he rented for the weekend on Airbnb.
He’s deep in the woods near Lake Tahoe because in two days he’ll run a triathlon. It’s a sport he loves, for the calm and the competition. And it's one that provides a base level of cardio that has powered his career, most notably his ability to defeat McGregor on just 12 days' notice.
Lake Tahoe is one of the world’s most picturesque and peaceful places, yet Diaz is animated and a little angry now. He shadowboxes as he talks because he now believes he fully understands how the UFC used to work him over. And he understands how a second victory over McGregor would make him one of the two or three biggest draws in the sport – an overnight sensation a dozen years in the making.
Diaz, 31, has been a pro since 2004 and been in the UFC since 2007, when he won "The Ultimate Fighter." He’s known for delivering exciting fights, if not always victories (19-10). There was a four-year, 14-fight stretch when he was awarded either fight or submission of the night 10 times. He says he's tried, at times, to be a company man but found an inherent dishonesty in it, from taking any bout, to claiming a love of fighting, to the pointless trash-talk designed to make empty headlines.
The UFC stopped putting him on pay per view in 2011, instead turning him into its go-to headliner for Fox national television cards – probably, Diaz suspected, because they knew he would deliver action. It also meant he wasn't paid relatively well – 20 grand, 25 grand, 30 grand a fight, he says.
Part of that was his rough-around-the-edges demeanor, authentic to his upbringing in blue-collar Stockton, Calif., but often distracting from his skill – he once brilliantly submitted Kurt Pellegrino but did so while shooting middle fingers in the air – “double fingers and a fully locked triangle,” crowed UFC commentator Joe Rogan.
He’s aware of the problem – appealing to some, not to others – but he has given up caring. On fight week, when he’s most visible, he mostly communicates via grunts and crude gestures.
“I’m not a very likable looking person,” he said. “If you see a picture of me at a fight, I’m never [expletive] happy. That’s why I try not to involve my family. That’s why I don’t have my mom or my sister or my girlfriend at the fight. I don’t want to embarrass nobody.
“You want to tell your mom this is my favorite guy here?” he continued. “And you look on TV and I’m going, ‘[expletive] you [expletive.]’ … People are like, ‘What is this guy, [mentally disabled]’. I’m not [mentally disabled].
“I’m just not listening to you unless you understand what I’m doing.”
He’s not fighting this week, which is why it was an entirely different Diaz in Tahoe. He arrives with a couple of friends and training partners from Stockton, Chris Avila and Danny Madrid, his longtime girlfriend Misty Brown and their dog, Machiavelli. They cook vegan burritos, talk about the triathlon and crack one-liners from different comedy routines. And he preaches about how fighters need to run careers that are best for them, not the promotion.
Fighters have been bristling about the UFC’s power over stars, as opposed to big-money boxing, for over a decade, back when Tito Ortiz and Randy Couture were battling with UFC president Dana White.
As a sophomore, Diaz dropped out of Tokay High School in Lodi, Calif., where he is probably best recalled for numerous after-school fights and the time he was bounced out of even driver’s education – “I was active in class,” he says with a laugh. Through constant contemplation and a decade-plus of hard knocks though, he believes he’s figured out the UFC, which itself has long been run partially on the guile and street smarts of White, whose formal education ended with a single semester at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
“People will say, ‘I’ll fight anybody, I love to fight,’” Diaz said. “You love to fight? [Expletive] that. People say that. And, yeah, I said that. And I woke up. It takes a lot of fighting to wake up. ‘I’ll fight anybody for free? I’ll fight anybody?’ That’s what [the UFC] wants. That’s what pads their bottom line. Then I realized, ‘[Expletive] you [expletive], you’re playing me.’”
He is an unlikely, but not lonely, advocate. If anything, the backlash may be growing. His fight against McGregor was moved off UFC 200 because McGregor didn’t want to fulfill the UFC’s demanded promotional work and, of late, has talked about getting future equity if the company is sold (reported price: over $4 billion).
Brock Lesnar, a headliner at Saturday’s UFC 200, has made no bones about the fact he has returned from the WWE because of money, but he has little interest in a full-time switch just for competition's sake. He will only do again if the big payday is there.
“I’ll fight whenever the money’s right,” Lesnar said last week.
Then there are lesser-known but very popular stars, such as Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, who often fills in for the UFC and in the past said he loves the sport so much, he’d “fight for free.” That caused Diaz to rip him for not treating this like the business the UFC does. LeBron James loves basketball, too, after all. Cerrone seemed to agree, stating on a recent television card that, “according to my pay, I don’t mean [expletive] to the UFC,” Cerrone said.
Diaz was impressed, sort of.
“Look at Donald Cerrone speaking up now because I call him a [expletive],” Diaz said. “Oh, now you’re going to speak up because you had this knowledge? You got called stupid, use your head.”
Diaz stopped appearing on UFC pay-per-views in 2011, instead becoming a staple on Fox network broadcasts. He believed it was because the UFC didn’t think it could control him. The promotion would argue that he wasn’t winning every bout, that he still got a lightweight title shot in 2012 and that they deal with all sorts of headaches.
It hardly matters who is correct; it’s what Diaz believed and how it fueled him. Especially as McGregor became the promotion’s multi-millionaire darling, quickly pushed and promoted into stardom because, Diaz believed, it wanted access to European fans. Diaz’s fan base was sizeable, but it was an established market. Then there were McGregor’s antics, which were just as boorish as that of Nate, and his brother Nick – the same behavior they believe the UFC tried to stifle.
“All he did was act like me and Nick with an Irish accent,” Diaz said. “They just want that Irish fan base because [he’s] got that silly accent.”
This was the business though.
“I’d look at my following [on social media] and other peoples' followings and I’d look at the numbers for the Fox shows they were putting me on and I was like, ‘Damn, a lot of people are tuning into these shows,’” Diaz said. “I was headlining a lot of them back to back. I was like, ‘I am bringing in bigger numbers than anybody and I’m not getting the deals.’
“‘Fox card,’ they always said. ‘Free TV, free TV.’ I was like, ‘No, it’s not free, they have million-dollar deals to put this many shows on Fox and I’m headlining three shows a year? … Then they are trying to shut me down, shut me up, [saying], ‘He doesn’t move the needle.' They are just trying to put that out in the mainstream because then people start saying that and it’s true.
“So then I’d tweet some [expletive] out and it would go viral and I was like, ‘[Expletive] that, I’ll do what I want and if they kick me out, I’ll win anyway.’”
The UFC didn’t kick him out though. They gave him the opportunity of a lifetime when Rafael dos Anjos came up injured less than two weeks prior his UFC 198 fight with McGregor. The UFC scrambled for an opponent to save the March show, which was trending to be a monster pay-per-view. It also needed to keep McGregor on pace for a big summer show – likely headlining Saturday’s UFC 200.
With so few options, there, as always, was Diaz, the willing, brawling, weight-cutting triathlete.
The problem was Diaz was walking around at 185 pounds and they wanted the fight to be at lightweight (155 pounds). The moment contract talks began, Diaz said started to fast and train in an effort to cut 30 pounds. He agreed to the weight, but not the money, believing the UFC was still vastly undervaluing him and the fan base he’d bring to pay-per-view.
“I’m having these conversations in my head,” Diaz said. “I’m out there running and I’m just thinking, if you put Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta in my position and said, ‘Make this weight next week and do everything I’m doing, and pay them their whole company’s worth, $4.2 billion, they couldn’t do it.’ They couldn’t. It doesn’t matter how much money there is.”
A day or two into negotiations, he was hungry, so he came up with a counter-proposal. If the UFC couldn’t come back with an agreeable number by that night, he and his girlfriend were going out to dinner. If that happened, 155 would be impossible and he would only fight at 165, drawing McGregor up in weight.
“I said, ‘[Expletive] is going change, I’m fighting at 165 now. You call me and say there’s a fight in 12 days and you want me to lose 30 [expletive] pounds? No. I’ll lose 20 pounds and we could fight. Yesterday I would have fought at 155 but your company [expletive] up, since you are best friends, the company and Conor McGregor, you want me to lose all those pounds for you guys. No, I’ll lose 20.'”
The UFC didn’t come through in time. Diaz and Brown had fish tacos for dinner. The next day a deal was made though, a big one, likely well into seven figures. With 155 off the table, McGregor agreed to go all the way to 170 despite having fought in December at 145. It would prove a fatal decision. Diaz may have won anyway, but McGregor was unable to capitalize early on Diaz’s lack of sparring. By round two, Diaz found his timing and everything changed.
“[Featherweights] crumble under those shots,” McGregor said after the fight of the early barrage that bloodied, but never threatened Diaz.
Diaz believed in not just the size difference, but also the quality of training partners and past opponents. About the only truly notable victory McGregor had was over Jose Aldo, who he caught with an overhand right as Aldo charged in during the fight’s opening seconds. Diaz chalked that up to Aldo getting overly upset at McGregor’s prefight trash talking and trying to knock him out with one shot. Diaz knew he wouldn’t fall for that trick.
“You have to be smart, not mad,” Diaz said.
The fight was the second biggest in UFC history, and suddenly, the company and McGregor needed Diaz. “I [expletive] up everyone’s plan by winning that fight.”
A rematch was a priority for McGregor to regain his swagger and it promises to deliver as one the biggest pay-per-views of all time, perhaps well over two million buys. Now in the driver’s seat, Diaz demanded his entire UFC contract get torn up with new guarantees and big money. Flush with more cash than he ever expected, a guy who grew up the son of a cook and a waitress and still lives humble was willing to play hardball.
“I was like, ‘Ha, ha, you [expletives], call me for the next one you better come with something good,” Diaz said. “I don’t give a [expletive]. You didn’t give me enough money but I come from a place with no money and you give me too much money. I don’t give a [expletive] about making more. I am doing better than I was ever supposed to do.”
A deal to headline UFC 200 was made. Then McGregor refused to do prefight publicity and threatened to retired. The fight was off, only to reemerge at UFC 202. During the delay Diaz said he demanded even more, not just for this fight but all ensuing fights regardless of outcome. Rumors began leaking into the media about McGregor taking on Floyd Mayweather in a boxing match – something almost no one in either sport believed was credible. Diaz never buckled.
The pot finally got sweetened again, Diaz said. The days of doing what he's told are over.
“You have to say something,” Diaz said. “I’ve already had too many years of not saying [expletive], and then I got people coming in left and right out of other organizations getting paid out. Are you kidding me? There were probably times I could have done that before but I wasn’t up to par on the knowledge.”
He is now, he promises. This unexpected business rebel, hopefully, he believes, is leading the way for other fighters – “Everybody should say this [expletive] and then [the UFC would] be overwhelmed.”
He’s still pacing in that living room, still talking boldly and loudly. Way up here in the mountains, way out here in the woods, big-money fight training camp set to begin and Nate Diaz is finally, at last, in control.
