Following his first UFC win on Saturday night, Cathal Pendred featured on the Ray D’Arcy show this morning in an interview that has offended many MMA fans.
Pendred was obviously keen to celebrate his excellent win because in his own words, “It changed my life”. Speaking on the Show today Pendred spoke about the financial pressure he was under in the lead up to the fight.
“I owed two months’ rent coming up to this fight. I owed €2000 to Airtricity, they kept calling me every day telling me they were going to cut me off.”
The money awarded to Pendred for the win has allowed him to get on top of his financial woes and, as we said above, he proudly stated that the win had changed his life.
But much to the annoyance of Pendred and other MMA fans, D’Arcy focused on the long held debate about the brutality of the sport rather than celebrating the extraordinary night for the Irish fighters in the O2.
“How do you feel about people paying money, rich people sponsoring the sport etc, to watch you and another man fight to the point of, well… not injury but you’ve got a black eye and your nose looks like you fell off a bike at speed”, D’Arcy asked Pendred.
Pendred replied that he didn’t think it was any different to “watching 22 men chase a ball around a pitch” and that in the history of the UFC there has never been a serious injury. But Pendred’s patience was clearly wearing thin when D’Arcy referred to him as ‘Conor’ instead of ‘Cathal’… twice.
When the interview ended, Pendred took to Twitter to vent his annoyance at the direction the interview took.
Looking forward to doing an interview where I celebrate the biggest win of my career 2 days ago, not defend myself and my sport.
— Cathal Pendred (@PendredMMA) July 21, 2014
You can listen to the interview on the Today FM site here, the interview starts at 36:40.
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