Colby Covington is no longer interested in fighting former best friend Jorge Masvidal.
There was one point where a fight between best friends turned bitter enemies Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal seemed inevitable. Their positions in the rankings were very close, and the storyline behind the fight was well known and high in drama.
The rumblings of the fight becoming reality hit peak levels following Masvidal’s loss to Kamaru Usman last July at UFC 251. Both Covington and Masvidal had lost to the champion but remained in the top 5. Even Dana White came out and said it was the fight they wanted to make, and there were even rumors that both men would coach against one another on The Ultimate Fighter (TUF).
Instead, Masvidal would be granted a rematch against Usman, only to be knocked out in the second round, while Alex Volkanovski and Brian Ortega were selected to coach TUF instead. With Masvidal now losing to Usman in a decisive fashion and dropping out of the top 5, Covington’s days of pushing for the fight have come to an end, with the #1-ranked welterweight contender officially deciding to move on from the once highly desired fight.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Covington told MMA Junkie about a fight against Jorge Masvidal. “I’m not gonna have people downplay my victory if I beat him. I’ve already owned his soul for the last 10 years when we trained together at American Top Team. You can go look on the internet, I used to hold him down in our kitchen and just pat on his face, ‘Get up Masvidal, get up, do something,’ and he couldn’t do anything. So he knows I’m his daddy, I’m his rightful owner, and there’s a reason he ducked the fight for so long. He doesn’t want to fight me.
“He knows I own the keys to his soul, so I don’t know. If the UFC really wants to do it, I’m the people’s champ, and I’m America’s champ for a reason. I’ll do what the people want, what the UFC want. I want to put the biggest and best fights in the organization, but I don’t feel like he’s the biggest and best fight in the organization. The guy has almost 20 losses on his record, he’s nothing more than a journeyman at this point, so his 10 seconds of fame are up, and there’s nothing for me to gain anymore.”
As Covington briefly touched on above, he went on to elaborate that, as far as he is concerned, he already holds a victory over Masvidal. And with that, he is only looking ahead to a title shot now that his former best buddy is irrelevant in his eyes.
“I’ve already beat him up and knocked him out multiple times in the gym. I have nothing to prove against him,” Covington said of Masvidal. “I want to go out there, beat ‘Marty Fakenewsman,’ solidify myself as the greatest welterweight in the world, and go on to solidify myself as the greatest welterweight of all time. I have unfinished business.”
Do you hope to see a fight between Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal at some point?
