Miesha Tate Clarifies McGregor Comments And Once Again Shows She Is Pure Class

The reigning UFC women’s bantamweight champion, Miesha Tate, had some words about the promotion’s featherweight champion, Conor McGregor, and his much-talked-about absence from UFC 200’s promotional events.

I understand that he has an obsession with beating Nate right now and he wants to stay focused and stay the course at all costs. I get it. But at the end of the day, it says in your contract when you sign that you have to do reasonable promotion. This is reasonable promotion. I have never had the UFC ask me to do unreasonable promotion. And they’re very accommodating. Whether it’s a car service to take you to where you need to train while you’re travelling. Whatever they can do to make your life easier, bringing breakfast to you, bringing lunch to you, whatever you need they’re really accommodating.

Tate’s words, however, earned her the ire of many of the featherweight champion’s fans, prompting her to get on her podcast — The Miesha Tate Show — and assure his supporters and hers that she harbored no ill will towards the brash Irishman.

“I am a fan of Conor McGregor. I think he has an awesome fighting style and he markets himself so uniquely, you can’t discredit that. He does a phenomenal job, everyone loves to watch him fight and that’s myself included.

But that did not mean Miesha Tate was happy with Conor skipping out on his promotional duties. In fact, she specifically said she agreed with her boss — UFC president, Dana White — about his decision to pull Conor off of UFC 200.

… I think that Dana is 100 percent right in saying, ‘Hey, if you’re not going to show up to do your part of the job then there’s going to be consequences.’ You can’t be the main event of one of the biggest cards of the year and not do the necessary media obligations. I disagree with him not showing up to that.

Tate also vented her frustration over Conor not showing up to film the commercial for UFC 200.

According to Miesha, Dana had offered to fly McGregor and 20 of his training partners over on a private jet.

Tate went on to say that, originally, she, Amanda Nunes, Frankie Edgar, Jose Aldo, and Conor were going to film two segments of the commercial.

However, when Conor did not show up, Miesha, in her words, had to “pick up the pieces.”

“Well because the main event didn’t show up we had to, they literally begged me when I showed up that morning, they begged me to come back – by ‘they’ I mean the producers of the commercial – begged me to come back and said ‘can you please come back later today and film this third segment?”

To make matters even worse for Tate, she had to miss her practice.

“So anyways, I agreed and came back and filmed the third one, but that caused me to miss my practice, and I had to switch everything around and it wouldn’t have been as big of a deal if I had known before but it was the day of and it threw a wrench in the whole mix and was just kind of frustrating to be honest.”

Miesha Tate makes a strong case for McGregor being pulled off of the card. Not only did he have a contractual duty to promote the event (even if he wasn’t being paid for it), but his no-show cut into the schedules of her and other fighters.

Tate also has the daunting task of defending her title for the first time at what could be the MMA promotion’s biggest event of the year. She and everyone else on the card need as much training time as they can get. They also do not need the added stress of having to re-film advertisements because one fighter did not want to show up.

Simply put, despite the fact that Miesha Tate had every reason and every right to be mad at Conor, she maintained a true level of class when speaking about him. She could have ranted and raved. She could have lowered herself to cheap insults over social media.

But she didn’t.

This is not the first time Miesha Tate has been a good sport with Conor.

Back in 2013, the Irishman made a rather graphic and rude comment about Tate and her longtime rival, Ronda Rousey.

But rather than get mad, Tate simply tweeted that she knew Conor was “just joking” and let bygones be bygones.

@TheNotoriousMMA its all good, appreciate the apology but I knew you were just joking!

— Miesha Tate (@MieshaTate) October 15, 2013

Neither Miesha Tate, nor anyone else in the UFC deserves any flack from Conor McGregor’s fans. The featherweight champion brought this upon himself, and if anyone deserves any criticism over social media, it is him.

[Dennis Van Tine/AP Images]