Bellator champ Patricio Freire: I offered to fight 'jerk' Michael Chandler – but only for five rounds

In a way, Patricio Freire did turn down a fight with Michael Chandler. But does that make him, as Chandler said, a “coward”?

Given the specific set of circumstances around a fight that, according to Freire, was actually requested by him, that’s the bit in which the featherweight champ will have to strongly disagree.

First, some context: Chandler (17-4 MMA, 14-4 BMMA) was originally set to rematch champ Brent Primus at next month’s Bellator 197 event until an injury forced Primus off the card. Chandler is now set to meet Brandon Girtz in an interim lightweight title bout at the event, but he told ESPN.com that’s only because Freire (26-4 MMA, 14-4 BMMA) passed up on the offer.

“I said, ‘100 percent, let’s do that,'” Chandler said. “I’ve been wanting to fight that guy for a while. I sent my contract over, and a couple hours later, I got a call back that basically said, ‘Never mind. Patricio is making all kinds of demands,’ which were basically smoke and mirrors for, ‘I don’t want to fight.’

“He’s said he wants to put my head on his mantle. Bellator gives him the fight he supposedly wants, and he turns it down. He’s a coward with a big mouth.”

Freire took issue with Chandler’s account of how things unfolded. And on Thursday, he offered his own explanation for why, exactly, the bout didn’t come to fruition.

“Michael Chandler is a jerk; this guy says things he doesn’t know,” Freire told MMAjunkie. “First of all, the fight was offered to my brother (former lightweight title challenger Patricky Freire), but he’s injured. He’s got injuries on his hand and knee. He’s still recovering. So I offered to fight. The offer for my brother was that he’d fight Michael Chandler for the interim title.

“But when I asked for the fight, and Bellator said they’d send the contract, the terms were different. It’d be a three-round fight, and it wouldn’t be for the interim title. I said I wouldn’t accept that. I wanted the fight the way it was offered (to my brother). And I thought they would give it to me that way. They didn’t – so I didn’t take it.”

Later on Thursday, Freire said on Twitter that he would even have taken the bout with no interim title implications – as long as it remained a five-round affair:

Which is where his puzzlement with the word “coward” comes in.

“A guy like that, calling me a coward because I didn’t take the fight?” Freire told MMAjunkie. “It seems like he’s playing dumb, because my demand was to do a five-round fight. How does a coward want to fight five rounds? Twenty-five minutes? I think our differences can’t be settled in 15 minutes. It needs to be a 25-minute war.”

As you may have noticed, there’s some history there. Patricio’s brother, Patricky Freire, has met Chandler in the Bellator cage twice, with two losses. After the most recent one, which had the 155-pound title on the line, Chandler exchanged some cageside words with Patricio.

Patricio Freire has not been secretive about his desire to meet Chandler since then, going so far as to say that he had no interest on the belt and that “all I want is to tear his head off.” Chandler, who most recently bounced back from his title loss to Primus with a win over Goiti Yamauchi, had also expressed interest in the matchup before.

It seems the feud won’t be settled this time around, but, judging by Freire’s ominous message, that doesn’t mean it’s out of the picture (via Twitter):

For more on Bellator 197, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.