Chris Weidman Aiming For Movie Career After Luke Rockhold
Yesterday (Mon., October 19, 2015) UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman revealed on The MMA Hour that he was the latest fighter to sign an exclusive sponsorship deal with Reebok, and was even surprised with his own signature Pump shoe.
After years of supposedly not getting a lot of respect due to his vast amount of doubters, it seems as if Weidman is finally being recognized as one of MMA’s most marketable stars. Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as he revealed that he was out in California meeting with some movie producers about some potential roles:
“We had some meetings with some writers and producers of some films. I was out there with Brad Slater – he does Ronda Rousey, he does the ‘The Rock’; he’s really the guy to have and I’m lucky enough to have him. I had some great meetings, met some really good guys. They’re looking forward to doing something with me.”
Grilled for details, Weidman said he couldn’t discuss specifics but that meetings did go well:
“I don’t know the legalities of talking about the movies I’d possibly get into. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but it was really good meetings.”
Moving on, Weidman addressed the latest recent scandal concerning former rival Vitor Belfort, whom he destroyed at May’s UFC 187 and has been linked to yet another elevated testosterone debacle surrounding his UFC 152 loss to Jon Jones. The middleweight titleholder isn’t surprised, because he remembers that Belfort came in with some fishy numbers prior to their bout at UFC 187.
Weidman detailed a possible avenue in which Belfort could have manipulated the system due to the manner in which test results are gauged:
“There’s just no way your testosterone is at 1200 at 38 years old; that’s just insane. But the, the other thing is that he’s not failing because the way that they test is through the epitestosterone to testosterone ratio, which I found out you can manipulate, so I’m thinking that he was manipulating that, but his testosterone number, they don’t look at that. That’s not what they base a failure on, they base it on the ratio and keeping the ratio close.”
Questions will most likely always remain about that and the reported test failure before Belfort fought Jones, so Weidman hoped that the UFC’s new, more stringent testing would lead to less controversies and cheating. He described how USADA had been thorough in seeking a random urine and blood test from him before moving on to discuss his main focus, his UFC 194 title fight against surging former Strikeforce champion Luke Rockhold.
HE had praise for his opponent, noting that he’s a good all-around fighter whom he will take seriously. With that said, however, Weidman said that Rockhold’s incessant trash talk does get to him at times, although he doesn’t remember it:
“Luke, I think, is a really good fighter, he brings a lot to the table and I have a lot of respect for him. I think his game is legit, so I’m taking him very, very serious. I think he’s a good guy, you know he’s talking trash and everything now. I like him. I like him as a person. He pisses me off with some of the things he says. It doesn’t piss me off enough to where I’m going to remember it. Nothing bothers me too much at this point; I’m pretty thick-skinned and I got enough going on in my life if something bothers me it might be for a couple minutes then I forget about it.”
Closing up about Rockhold, the champion said that while he may not like it, he understands a top fighter needs to have somewhat of a cocky attitude, which he’s certainly been accused of before:
“He definitely has a cocky attitude, which you need to be a good fighter. So he has a little cockiness, and he thinks he’s gonna beat me, which I think is wrong, so you could say I’m cocky too.”
