Ricardo Lamas Confirms Yair Rodriguez Initially Accepted Fight Before Backing Out

On May 11, the Ultimate Fighting Championship controversially released one of its hottest young stars in Yair Rodriguez, with the promotion citing the fighter was released for turning down fights with Ricardo Lamas and Zabit Magomedsharipov.

Rodriguez appeared on the latest episode of “The MMA Hour” on Monday and says these claims by the UFC are false.

“They said Ricardo Lamas, then I said yes to Ricardo Lamas. I accepted to fight Ricardo Lamas, but then I later learned that he didn’t take the fight with me. He decided to fight [Mirsad] Bektic instead. Then, during that process, the Zabit fight was causing a lot of hype on social media… I was like, alright, this is going to be great. I started looking at the big potential for this fight. And it was kind of my fault that I…like a week after Lamas declined the fight, Sean Shelby called me again and he said, ‘hey, the Lamas fight is still back open. It’s back open for you to fight.’ And after I was asking for any top 10 [opponent] and they didn’t want to give it to me, and then Lamas took Bektic instead of me, I was kind of disappointed. Just kind of disappointed, I’ll say that.”

Lamas spoke with A.J. Hawk and R.J. Clifford on SiriusXm about his involvement in negotiations:

“We approached UFC because we heard they were coming to Chicago, so we wanted to get on the card. The first person they came back to us with was Mirsad Bektic. They said, ‘You want to fight in Chicago? The only fighter we have right now is Mirsad.’ So we verbally accepted to that right away, obviously, because they said it was the only person. And we were waiting to hear from Mirsad’s camp. And during that time, Sean Shelby had come back to us and said that Yair Rodriguez is also an option. So we said, we don’t care; we’ll fight whoever.”

Lamas confirmed that he accepted the fight, although once the Mexican was informed Lamas had verbally agreed to fight Bektic before agreeing to fight him, he subsequently backed out of the fight:

“And then Sean went back, apparently Yair had accepted the fight already, so that part’s true. That’s what Sean told us when he came to us, he said, ‘The other option is Yair, and he’s already verbally accepted.’ So we said, we don’t care; we’ll fight whoever. So Sean went back to Yair to try to lock it up. And then I guess when Yair found out I had verbally accepted to Mirsad first, then he backed out of the fight.”