UFC middleweight fighter Chael Sonnen was on a local sports talk show in San Francisco earlier today to promote his main event fight this Saturday night in Oakland against UFC middleweight champion, Anderson Silva.
Here are some colorful quotes from the interview with Sonnen.
I haven't seen a whole lot of his fighting and I'm going to try to zero in on it over the next few days. I'll sit down on the computer and bring up some of his matches.
This isn't something new. I have been sticking my finger in this guy's chest for four years.He just doesn't want to fight me. I called him out four years, three years ago, two years ago, a year ago.
Nobody else has challenged him. Nobody in any weight class has challenged him. They're all scared of this guy.
Everyone in the UFC roster should be embarrassed of themselves. If you don't call out the champion, they ought to give you the pink slip from the UFC.
I really don't know what respect means. I always hear that. It sounds like something that two street thugs say to each other before somebody takes the other one's jacket.
I'm going to run my fist into his face repeatedly whether I admire what he's done or not.
We had an altercation in a hallway in a hotel in Las Vegas one time.
We put hands on each other but it wasn't in an overly aggressive manner. There was a lot of people around and a lot of cameras around. He got more of a verbal beating than anything else.
It was unintentional.It was a narrow hallway. There's not enough room for both of us in the UFC. One of us has to go and on Saturday night, one of us will.
It comes down to working hard and who can work harder and who can push harder. There's a lot talk of who's better standing up and who's better on the ground.
Five or six minutes in, we are both going to be tired. Ten minutes in, we are both going to be hurt.
One of us is going to stay in there and grind out because they want to be world champion.
80% of the fights go to the ground and 100% of the fights start standing up so we are going to fight all over. We are the two best guys in the world so to pretend that any of us has a glaring weakness in any area is silly.
We are gonna be all over the Octagon.There's a reason they put this thing in a steel cage.
Training is hard. It is not extremely time consuming. It takes about two and a half to three hours a day.
It's hard. Some days I wake up on a Monday morning and I'll be depressed knowing what I have to do that day or that week. It's grueling mentally and physically but frankly that's the way it should be. If you are going to headline a UFC and fight for a world championship, it should be hard.
I've had this goal my whole life to be the world champion. I tried to make the Olympic team and I came up short.
They're (MMA and politics) both dirty and vicious.
My final word would be to tell everybody that when you are the best fighter in the world, they got a name for you. They don't call you great fighter, they call you Chael Sonnen.
