Nick Diaz, set to fight ex-UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva in January, said he won’t try and attack the leg Silva broke late last year.
“When someone tells you a fighter’s injured and they tell you to go after an injury, it really throws you off,” Diaz said, according to MMAFighting.com.
“It would be sad to lose a fight on account of, you’re trying to concentrate on capitalizing on someone’s weakness when it comes to injury and something like that, [rather than fighting] your fight without worrying about something like that.”
Diaz will face Silva during UFC 183 in Las Vegas on Jan. 31.
“Someone came up to me and told me that [his opponent's] knee was hurt,” Diaz recalled, “and he said to me, attack his knee, I’m like, ‘Yeah right, I’m not going out to attack this guy’s knee.’ It just doesn’t … it’s not realistic to go after his injury, unless they got a cut the same week, then it’s like, yeah, hit him in the eye, because the [expletive] is going to re-open and now you wouldn’t fight on the cut. Maybe on a cut you want to take advantage of it, that makes sense.”
A few days ago, Diaz also said his DUI arrest was a “big misunderstanding.”
“Where I live, everybody knows how it is in Lodi,” Diaz told Fox Sports.
“You can’t even drive through town at the wrong hours without getting stopped. I was just having a real bad night. I wasn’t really getting along with the officer very well,” he added. “There’s a lot to that story that people don’t understand. I haven’t really been having a lot to say about it. It’s not a big deal to me. It is a big deal, of course, but there’s a lot to the story that people don’t understand.”