Nate Diaz doesn’t understand how he got all mixed up in some kind of heated rivalry with UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev.
This past December at the UFC 311 pre-fight press conference, Diaz and Makhachev were involved in a brief backstage altercation where members from their respective teams threw water bottles at each other before security intervened to ensure the situation didn’t escalate. Makhachev later claimed that the whole ordeal started with Diaz flipping his team off with his middle finger and then next thing you know, water bottles went flying.
Now Diaz has responded and says he didn’t even know Makhachev was with the group that threw a water bottle at him.
“[What the hell is] going on?,” Diaz wrote on Instagram. “I didn’t even know Islam was there. I don’t even know which one he is. I was just there to corner my boy [Kron Gracie] and these [Ewoks] were looking for [trouble] threw a bottle at me looking for clout. [What the f*ck] did I do?”
After the incident went public, UFC flyweight contender Brandon Royval actually backed part of Diaz’s claims after he says he witnessed Makhachev’s teammate Tagir Ulanbekov fire off the first bottle of water, which nearly hit him.
In the same interview where Makhachev addressed the water bottle throwing incident, he also said that he didn’t know why Diaz suddenly had a problem with him after they seemingly had a mutual respect after running into each other in an elevator at a separate event.
“You know what’s interesting, maybe five, six months ago, I meet Diaz in the elevator in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas,” Makhachev said. “He goes to me and says, ‘Respect, respect, respect.’ But what changed now? A lot of cameras come and always people change.
“We don’t have something. If I have something with him, I can fix it in the Wynn Hotel. But he came to me and said ‘Respect’ and then he go. But when camera comes, he’s changing. And people think I started this!”
That interaction apparently stuck in Makhachev’s head when the water bottle incident happened but Diaz claims he never actually approached the UFC lightweight champion in any elevator much less told him there was respect between them.
“I never saw this guy in an elevator,” Diaz said. “[What the f*ck?], I thought religious people didn’t lie. [What the f*ck] is happening? And [what the f*ck] happened to champ. All you had to do was say yes champ.”
There’s no telling when Diaz and Makhachev might cross paths again but it seems like there’s no love lost between these two.