After Stephen
Thompson declined to face an overweight Michel
Pereira at UFC 291, the promotion offered him another opponent
a little more than a month later.
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On his YouTube channel, “Wonderboy” recently revealed that he was
given the chance to face Jack
Della Maddalena at UFC 293 in Sydney on Sept. 9. However, since
he was just coming off a lengthy training camp in preparation for
Pereira, the six-week turnaround was too much.
“This is literally the weekend of UFC 291, but UFC comes to me and
was like, ‘Hey, how about you fight JDM in Australia?’ I was like,
‘No, too soon,’” Thompson said. “You know, I’ve been training since
April. So my training camp has been wearing me down, want to heal
up from that. So I told them no.
“And they were like, ‘OK, well, how about fighting the following
weekend in Vegas?’ I was like, ‘Man, still too soon again.’ My
body’s broken down. I want to be able to heal back up, but not only
that, JDM is a tough dude. I want to get a full-on, proper training
camp if I want to face a guy like JDM.”
Because Thompson made weight ahead of UFC 291, the fact that he
didn’t receive his show purse was a subject of controversy.
However, Dana White
shot down the notion that an athlete would receive compensation
without fighting. Thompson is willing to fight the up-and-coming
prospects with a full training camp, but a recent possibility
intrigues him even more.
“I told UFC, ‘Look, I’ll fight the JDMs, I will fight the Ian
Garrys, just give me a full training camp,’” he said. “And then a
few days later, lo and behold tomorrow, Kamaru
Usman calls me out?”
Usman mentioned Thompson as a potential opponent during a recent
interview with TMZ Sports. According to “Wonderboy,” that’s the
type of matchup that would get him closer to another welterweight
title shot before his career is through.
“I want to show the UFC — and not just the UFC, the fans — that I’m
not a gatekeeper,” he said. “I’ve got a small window to kind of do
what I want to do with the fight game. I’m 40 years old, and when I
see a chance to go for another title shot before it’s over, when
Kamar Usman calls me out, I’m like, dude, no brainer. No
brainer.
“I mean, yes, Gilbert
Burns beat me. Yes, Belal
Muhammad beat me. But I’ve never faced a guy that beat me the
way that they beat me before. So I learned a lot from those two
fights and [have been] working on it ever since, and this is my
opportunity to show the UFC and the fans and fighters out there
that I got what it takes to go for that title again, that I got
what it takes to face those guys in the top five, in the top three,
the No. 1 contender, that I can fight for the title again.”