The feud between Donald Cerrone and his former camp Jackson-Wink over their decision to train his opponent Mike Perry insteaad of him has certainly been the topic of much debate this week and the latest big name fighter to give their opinion on it is former women’s bantamweight champion Miesha Tate.
“I feel like we’ve heard this story about this camp before when it was Rashad Evans and him feeling like he was pushed out of the spot with Jon Jones coming in,” Tate said on her Sirius XM radio show this week.
“What I think is not cool, if it had been someone that had been training there like Carlos Condit or someone like that who had been training there a long time and they were gonna fight each other and both had that mutual respect, and mutual foundation at that gym, that’s different. But when the new guy is coming in and he’s like, ‘I wanna fight Cowboy’ and he comes to Cowboy’s gym, I think that the right thing to do by the gym – I think there’s some loyalty that should be towards Cowboy. He’s been there a really, really long time.”
The way sees it, the camp could easily have smoothed things over with Perry and not burned any bridges over the situation if they’d just stuck with Cerrone for this particular fight instead, given his long association with the team.
“‘This is probably not the camp for you to come in, Mike, because you’re fighting our boy. Cowboy has been with us forever. We’d love for you to come in for the next camp but Cowboy’s our dude,’” Tate said. “That’s how I think. Even though I know Cowboy doesn’t drive there every single day, he doesn’t train at the gym – there are some other reasons I think behind that, I think – that’s just me. That’s how I hope my gym would operate if I was under those circumstances.”
