This is not a great time to be Fabricio Werdum.
That’s mostly due to the actions of Werdum himself, who has somehow gone from clown prince of the UFC heavyweight division to a borderline pariah in record time, thanks to only a couple bad moves.
Start with the most recent one, which involved Werdum (21-7-1 MMA, 9-4 UFC) nearly coming to blows with Tony Ferguson (23-3 MMA, 13-1 UFC) at a media lunch Thursday.
Ferguson’s a lightweight and Werdum’s a heavyweight, so already the odds are good that Werdum is going to be the one who emerges from this looking like a bully. Just to make sure he loses the battle for public opinion, Werdum tosses out the same gay slur in Spanish over and over, the one that even non-native speakers have learned to recognize in conversation.
It seems to be one of Werdum’s favorite words, both for when he’s joking and when he’s mad, even if the English translation has become one of the few things UFC fighters can’t call each other in the heat of the moment without getting in some trouble.
But Werdum’s gotten away with that one before, probably because he can lean on the dual forces of cultural and linguistic differences. Plus, he’s Werdum. He’s the Go Horse, man. People love that guy. He jokes around and makes the troll face, and come on, he beat Fedor Emelianenko back when that still seemed impossible. He’s just fun to have around.
Still, at a certain point the missteps start to feel like connecting dots. For instance, look at all the Ramzan Kadyrov stuff.
A couple years ago, UFC fighters could cash a check in exchange for visiting the brutal Chechen dictator, and it was all fun and games. You dress up in the clothes, you show up at his MMA events, then you take your money and go home.
But now that Chechnya’s violent purge of gay men has gotten media attention, and now that Kadyrov’s bloody regime is more regularly in the news, fighters like Chris Weidman and Frank Mir have tried to distance themselves from him. Hey, they were only there for a paying gig.
Werdum, meanwhile, is still supporting Kadyrov’s Akhmat Fight Club. Apparently the connection to a ruthlessly anti-gay dictator who was last seen on American TV threatening nuclear armageddon is not enough of a deterrent for the former UFC heavyweight champ.
It’s tough, because you want to like a guy like Werdum. He insists he’s got nothing against gay people, that he was just reaching for any insult he could out of anger at Ferguson. That’s a common enough explanation for that particular mistake, and it may very well be true, and anyway you want to believe it, because you want to think well of Werdum. He’s the fun-loving jokester who offers needed relief from all the humorless badasses glowering their way through life in the UFC.
Then he flips out on a lightweight and reaches immediately for the gay slurs, all while repping a violently anti-gay government regime, and suddenly we’re not having fun anymore. The stuff you could maybe give him a pass on seems a little too close to the stuff you can’t, and at some point you have to wonder if you really know him as well as you thought you did.
The answer is probably no, we don’t. We don’t really know any of these people. But whether he means to or not, the things he says and does are starting to paint a certain picture of Werdum. Right about now would be a good time for him to ask if he likes how it looks.
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