Nick Diaz is back, and he’s bringing the savviest mind in the fight game with him.
With all the excitement surrounding his return, one probably wouldn’t expect to read that sentence before he even had a fight booked. Yet here we are.
Sure, there are plenty of things to love about Diaz and plenty of reasons to love them. You might love his unyielding commitment to botanic consumption. Or his distaste for authority. Or his relentless fight style. Chances are, if you like to be entertained, you like all three.
But what’s lost in all of those things, and in the hollers and cries to make sure Diaz gets paid and gets an opponent the world wants to see him fight, is that the man is brilliant. Legitimately, off-the-charts brilliant. You just need to look past the “bitches” and “motherf--kers” he’s peppering into his vernacular to see it.
Outside of overwhelming some poor sap with combo punching and a triathlete’s stamina, Diaz’s greatest skill is the ability to control the narrative of his career by controlling the conversations about it. Nobody in the sport—maybe nobody in any sport—does it better.
Put a microphone in front of him and ask him about his place in the MMA landscape. He’s going to say things that are patently true, patently untrue or patently ridiculous. Most important, he’s going to leave anyone who heard him believing all of it.
Whether he does this intentionally or accidentally—or something between the two—is both unknown and irrelevant. The fact is that, simply by opening his mouth and making statements, Diaz has wrestled control from Dana White and the UFC.
He turned the conversation into one where he’s calling the shots and making the rules. Until brother Nate started following the same blueprint, no one had even considered such an approach to doing business as a fighter under the most powerful banner in the sport.
As an example, look at Diaz’s first interviews since being reinstated from suspension. The first two outlets to land some time with him were ESPN and TMZ, two entities with reach far beyond the MMA space. If that's not enough to convince you of the importance of Stockton’s favorite son, look at the content of the interviews.
Diaz told TMZ: “The thing is, I’m on top. I’m the one on top. They’re dropping my name.” Given that Tyron Woodley holds the gold, Diaz calling himself "the one on top" is one of those patently untrue statements. And yet there’s enough truth in it—he may well be one of the top pay-per-view draws in the company, and he is surely one of the top draws without a title—that you can easily see his point.
It’s a point he doubled down on later in the interview, saying “I don’t need no fake ass piece of plastic…I made pay-per-view without a title, I don’t need that fake ass plastic to be somebody.”
“I’m over here…I don’t owe nobody nothing. I don’t owe nobody s--t…nobody’s done what I’ve done in this s--t. It just hasn’t happened yet.”
Again, there’s enough nuance in the language he’s using and enough flexibility in the points he’s making that it’s impossible to deny the existence of some truth. It may not be articulate, but it is brilliant.
He doesn’t owe anyone anything because he’s made some big purses and enjoyed his time off. In terms of standing up to the UFC and taking control of his career on the way to becoming a truly self-made star, nobody’s done what he’s done.
A more detailed conversation took place with Brett Okamoto of ESPN. Diaz was on point with an array of winding diatribes that further supported his interests as he returns to active competition.
“I'm on top right now. I'm on top of this game. There ain't no 'giving' me a shot. I'm giving somebody a shot. If anybody's getting a shot, somebody's getting a shot against me because I'm the guy to beat,” he said, never looking at the camera and occasionally interrupting questions before they were finished in textbook Diaz fashion.
When prospective opponents such as Woodley or Robbie Lawler came up (the world has been dying to see a Diaz-Lawler rematch for a decade), he was dismissive: "What are [these] guys gonna do for me? I can't help you. You can't help yourself. You need to go help yourself and then maybe after you do that we can have some sort of deal."
So it's officially #NickDiazIsFree Day. That means it's officially time for Joe Silva to get to work signing Diaz/Lawler II. #UFC
— Matthew Ryder (@matthewjryder) August 1, 2016
Then he doubled down again.
“I don't see a superstar out there. I don't see Georges St-Pierre coming back. He's too scared to come back and do a fight with me and the rest of these guys are not superstars. Who are they? I don't even want to say their name because no one even heard it yet until I say something and now everybody knows who the guy is."
This is classic narrative control. It’s the type of thing you’d expect to see from a professional interrogator or a prosecutor. Instead, you're seeing it from a mixed martial artist who laments that no one ever taught him how to do his taxes.
Sitting on the biggest sports network in the world, less than a day after being freed from suspension, he snarled about his own value as a marquee name and rightfully criticized the total lack of drawing power at 170-pounds for anyone not named Georges St-Pierre. Diaz knows that money fight is out there, but he'll only get it if he can goad St-Pierre into taking it by saying he’s afraid.
Put in his position, anyone else in the sport would be talking about getting back into the fray as soon as possible and gunning for a title shot. But Diaz is suggesting he might never fight again—he claims he doesn’t need to, and no one out there is giving him the itch.
Again, this is likely untrue and bordering on ridiculous, but his willingness to shout it with conviction from the highest mountaintop is enough to keep him in control. Everyone knows what he thinks—or what he wants people to believe he thinks. If the UFC doesn’t bring him the right fight for the right amount, he’ll stay at home before he’ll let them call the shots or force him into action. He’s used to being at home now. He likes it.
So as the sport anxiously awaits a fight announcement for Diaz, take a few minutes to appreciate just how good the man has become at playing the system that he felt played him for years. Cut through the bluster and belligerence and get to the message itself and the thrust behind it. You will quickly see that Diaz is actually quite nuanced in his negotiating techniques and far brighter than he gets credit for.
He may not even realize it, but he is, in many ways, genuinely brilliant.
