Mehdi Baghdad: Egotistical Joe Silva Told Me To Fight Injured Or I Would Get Released
Following his loss to John Makdessi in July, Mehdi Baghdad was looking to redeem himself going into his booked fight with Jon Tuck at UFC Fight Night 97 in Manila, Philippines in October. However, after the bout was booked, Baghdad was forced to pull out with an abdominal hernia. Following that decision, the UFC released him.
“I was in emergency the night before I gave the bad news that I had to pull out,” Baghdad told BloodyElbow.com’s The MMA Circus. “I called my manager, my manager called Joe Silva. And Joe Silva just answered back like, ‘You need to pull out? We cut you.’ And my manager said, ‘Come on, man, you can’t do that! The doctor said that he has to do surgery; he can’t fight. And then he forced himself to fight? He can’t! He has to do surgery.’ So my manager let me know. ‘They need you to go fight, or you are fired.’”
After he was released from the largest MMA promotion in the world, Baghdad had a life-changing decision to make, and it wasn’t easy.
“So I said, ‘So let me choose in my head. I’m fired from UFC, or I’m f-cked up from fighting, because I can have a big problem if I fight with my hernia.’ I get the choice — my health is the first choice, I’m not going to fight with the hernia when the doctor told me I can’t. It’s not just because I’m a little bit hurt here or somewhere. I had surgery last week, he opened my abdomen. It’s not something I tried to lie, so I don’t know, I don’t understand.”
According to Baghdad, Joe Silva, longtime UFC matchmaker who’s leaving the company at the end of 2016, is very egotistical. In the past, Silva has told fighters, who were cut from the UFC, that if they won a few fights on the local scene that they could come back to the promotion. However, for Baghdad, that wasn’t the case, and he was not told that.
“I think it’s just the ego of Joe Silva,” he said. “He just said, ‘If you no get this fight, if you pull out, we fire you.’ That’s why, three weeks later, I got this letter, you fired from UFC,” he said. “It’s not about you can come back one more or two more fights, it’s not about this. He told me nothing about I come back. Sometimes, Joe Silva has to understand the fighters’ lives. We have a really hard life. I left my country 10 years ago. I left my family just for UFC. And how they treat me, it’s really disrespectful.”
Baghdad stated in this interview that he has already received offers from numerous large promotions but has yet to sign with them because he’s focused on recovering from his injury and surgery.
