As a former friend and teammate whose relationship with Colby Covington has seemingly gone sour, it’s perhaps no surprise that Jorge Masvidal has a few thoughts on his former training partner’s downfall at the hands of Kamaru Usman at UFC 245.
Covington battled all the way to the final round with the defending UFC welterweight champion, but was stopped with just 50 seconds to go, and later confirmed to have a broken jaw as a result of his war with “The Nigerian Nightmare” in Las Vegas.
Speaking to Jim Rome on the CBS Sports Network, Masvidal explained that after Covington reportedly didn’t pay their coach following his win over Rafael dos Anjos, he had wanted to break Covington’s jaw himself, but Usman eventually got there first.
“At first my initial thing was just to break his face in, but my coach said that’s probably gonna get me in jail. Let the universe take care of him.
“His exact words were: ‘We’ll get him in a prize ring and break his jaw’. Somebody beat me to that. But his jaw’s broken.”
And after seeing Covington elevate his stock through divisive comments and troll-like behavior, Masvidal admitted he was struggling not to enjoy the feeling of schadenfreude after seeing Covington finished in Las Vegas on Dec. 14
“Man, I don’t like to always be highly critical of human beings because I’m nowhere near perfect,” he said. “But I’m just not with that whole… your career’s based out of getting a rise out of people, right? If I come on your show and I’m just saying a bunch of controversial stuff for people to be talking about me… just to get reactions out of people. It’s not really my cup of tea, but people do it all the time, and he’s the number-one poster boy for that. So he always wants to get a reaction out of people.
“Now this individual, when people are trying to get a reaction out of him, he’s reporting people on Instagram. He took the comments off, so you can’t comment on him. He was saying how negative they were to him and stuff. This is the guy that’s calling people virgins, calling people nerds that live in their parents’ basement, making fun of Brazilians.
“That country, it’s not like it’s a rich country that’s doing well. They’ve got a lot of poverty over there and a lot of people over there that take it to heart what he’s saying, but he doesn’t give a flying (expletive). And he does it all for a like on Facebook, for a paycheck for the three, four, five pay-per-views that it went up with? The guy’s a clown, man. He got what he deserved.”
