I only came on here to see how long it took before somebody said "
He's fucking can-crushing and looks like shit doing it!" (despite the fact that, including Aoki next month, his last 7 opponents have had a combined 157-25 record) and "
Prove it in the UFC then! Oh wait, you weren't good enough! Coward!" (like contracts
aren't a thing and that every non-UFC organization has Wild Buck's Fight Night-style loose contracts, and you can just easily go anywhere, or like Ben Askren was the unreasonable one in the 2013 UFC negotiations.)
10 and 17 posts, respectively. A lot later than I expected.
Watch Askrens one fc fights... hes fighting for his life against absolute bums
lolwut? Did you
watch his last two fights, or even his first two fights, or did you just keep re-watching the Sapo fight and that 10-second period in the fourth round of the Aleksakhin fight and assume that they're both not only bad fighters (which isn't the case at all) but that that's how every fight has been?
I was going to read the article for context to see if Ben actually called him out (unlikely) or if he was asked specifically about it and answered honestly (likely). Unfortunately, they wouldn't show me unless I turned off my ad blocker so I'll just have to assume.
I checked it out for you. The writer asked him directly. The opening line of the article was a hypothetical question about an Askren-Mcgregor fight, so it's clear this was his intention from the beginning.
On a related note, a lot of people have said how Askren just randomly calls out fighters because "
that's just how irrelevant he is and this's the only way he can get attention, maaaaan!", but, really, he
rarely does that. It's
always an interviewer who asks him a question and goads it out of him. And if Askren was ever the kind of guy that just said, "
Well, I think that, uh, it would be a competitive fight, but I believe in my skills would that have happened but it's not on my mind at the moment..." he never would've become as popular as he is.
