Derrick Lewis Saved Confederate Flag-Carrying Man In Houston Hurricane

UFC heavyweight Derrick Lewis lives in Houston, where a terrible hurricane has been flooding and wreaking havoc over the past few days.

Lewis, in the midst of preparing for a showdown with Fabricio Werdum at October’s UFC 216, helped rescue a man and his family from the flooding despite the fact that they were toting a Confederate flag.

Lewis told the story as Hurricane Harvey continued to tear through Houston to MMAjunkie.com, and it was quite the interesting one:

“I don’t care about that. I live in Texas. It ain’t nothing new. I’ve been living in the South all my life, and it ain’t nothing I hadn’t seen before or discussed about. I don’t care about that type of stuff. I just wanted to help him.”

“I picked up one guy and his family, his wife – he just kept apologizing to me, because all he really had was his clothes, and he wanted to take his Confederate flag. He wanted to take that with him, and he just apologized and said, ‘Man, I’ll sit in the back of your truck, man. I don’t want to have my flag inside of your truck like this.’ I said, ‘Man, I’m not worried about that.’

“He’s saying, ‘You never know if you ever need someone, so …’ – I already knew where he was going with it. I just said, ‘Don’t even worry about it. It’s OK. I don’t care about that.’ His wife kept hitting him and saying, ‘You should have just left it.’”

With all of the racial tension and animus going on due to far-right groups asserting themselves in Charlottesville recently, Lewis says the man’s wife was more angered at the Confederate flag-wearing man more than he was.

But it’s encouraging to know that “The black Beast was willing to put racial differences aside and do what he knew was right in terms of pure human decency.

Lewis and Werdum will throw down on October 7.