Being a UFC Hall of Famer entitles one to certain privileges. Among them is having the ability to advise fighters across the promotion on a wide array of topics and have your input valued and treated with respect. Rashad Evans took advantage of that privilege in an interview backstage at the 2019 Hall of Fame induction last weekend when he advised fighters not to butt heads with the UFC (Transcript via Bloody Elbow):
“I’ll just tell them ‘don’t pick that bag up,’ because at the end of the day, it’s not something you can win,” Evans told MMA Fighting. “The UFC, the promotion, Dana White, that’s the promotion. And you can’t win against the promotion.
“You’re gonna have disagreements, you’re gonna have times when you need to stand your ground,” he continued. “But at the end of the day, I think that cooler heads prevail. I think when they go into the media they make it worse by just spreading the mess, the business.”
Rashad Evans isn’t advocating “toeing the line” or subjecting oneself to the promotion’s every whim, but there in the end, there is still a right way and a wrong way to about voicing disagreements:
“It’s not so much having a problem, it’s just how you handle it and just not getting too into your point that you can’t see another person’s point-of-view.”
Rashad Evans competed in the UFC for a total of 13 years, so he knows a thing or two about what it takes to carry longevity both as an athlete and as a businessman.
Do you agree with Rashad Evans’s advise to fighters about how to handle disagreements with the UFC?
