At the UFC: Unstoppable press conference on Friday, Claudia Gadelha snarled something curious at Joanna Jedrzejczyk.
“The bottle didn’t hit me,”Gadelha said. “But I kicked you, remember?”
UFC president Dana White had to keep the pair from fighting on stage.
White appeared Friday night at the EA Sports UFC 2 launch party at Mandalay Bay, and explained.
“You noticed when they were showing each other the water bottles [during the press conference]?” said White, as transcribed by Marc Raimondi for MMA Fighting. “Joanna Jedrzejczyk hit her with a water bottle and that’s how the fight started. Wait until you see this season of The Ultimate Fighter with these two. They hate each other and the staredown in the gym was even crazy before the fight happened.”
“This was one of those crazy things where the season had ended and everybody was doing their thing and I just didn’t expect that to happen. Well what happened was, when they did the square off, Joanna said ‘I’m gonna’ and Claudia goes ‘shut the f*** up a******’. She goes ‘I’m so f***ing sick of listening to your mouth’ and they started going at it and I pulled them apart. Then when we broke for the show, they were sitting down on the benches and I could tell. In hindsight, everything’s 20/20 so I could see Joanna’s f***ing wheels turning during the thing and she just kept staring at her.
“Then when the room started to clear out, she hit her with a water bottle and then game on.”
“Show’s over, cameras are put away, and literally the fighters had gone. The sad and scary part was very few people were left in the gym,” White said.
“It’s not that Joanna is a trash talker, the difference with Joanna is every time I see her, she’s ready to fight. She’s just ready to fight. And her and Claudia don’t like or respect each other. It’s just one of those situations with two, bad-ass nasty fighters who don’t like each other.”
“If you notice during the press conference, when those two started talking I turned around and I’m like, how the f*** did we end up putting those two next to each other?”
White sent security to keep the pair apart.
Jedrzejczyk beat Gadelha via split decision at UFC on Fox: dos Santos vs. Miocic on December 13, 2014?. So when they fight the women’s strawweight title on July 8, maybe it will be billed as Jedrzejczyk vs. Gadelha III.
