The BJ Penn Vs. Gilbert Melendez fight that never came to be is the hot hypothetical topic to everyone in the MMA world right now, but the MiddleEasy staff was discussing this (at one point very real) matchup in our super secret MiddleEasy email client half a year ago. Yeah, that’s right: we have a super secret MiddleEasy email client in which we discuss super secret things. Things like Gilbert Melendez and BJ Penn scrapping for the Strikeforce lightweight title, space plans and why synthetic vitamins aren’t good for you (don’t eat synthetic vitamins).
You can ask Cat Von C: our super secret MiddleEasy email conversations would probably do triple the traffic of MiddleEasy.com, but a lot of that is due to the discussion of things that shall not be discussed publicly. To put it in wizard terms: MiddleEasy email = The Order of the Phoenix. Things talked about in said emails = Voldemort.
Many may think the two preceding paragraphs are meant to puff our feathers and display how cool we are. Not true. I guess what I’m trying to get to is this: we were bummed about this fight not happening months ago, and we wanted to share the pain with you – but we couldn’t – so now we’re kind of over it just as the general public is hearing about it…So yeah.
BJ Penn showed his apathy over the Gilbert Melendez situation in an appearance on The MMA Hour.
“I guess being a competitor, you always have that itch. But what it is is…it’s tough,” “The training camps are tough, going through that. I’ve been with the UFC for ten years going through different things. All the different personalities you gotta deal with. I still look at some of the guys up there and of course being a competitor ‘You know, I could beat that guy or I could do well with that guy.’ It’s just a tough question.”
“[White] offered a fight against Gilbert Melendez in Strikeforce. We sat down and we thought about it for a little while. We talked back and forth. It was kind of one of those things where I guess at the end of the day we thought about it a thousand different ways and we were like ‘Is that downgrading yourself fighting in Strikeforce? If you win the Strikeforce title are people going to say you did it because you couldn’t win the UFC title?'” “At the end of the day, it just didn’t make sense to us,”
Hopefully at the end of the day, BJ will decide to come back and make us happy while licking his opponent’s blood of his gloves.
[Source]
