Sean Strickland makes surprising admission about Khamzat feud

The buildup to UFC 328 saw Sean Strickland and Khamzat Chimaev locked in a tense feud that included harsh words and even a kick during their press conference. But after the final bell, the mood had shifted completely. The two fighters touched gloves before the opening round and exchanged respect once it was over.

It didn’t take long for fans to wonder if all that animosity was ever real in the first place. Strickland himself later admitted he felt genuine hatred at the time, but looking back, he thinks it might have been more about his own mental state than anything Chimaev actually did.

“Maybe it’s just who he is as a person but when he was in the gym he was really threatening,” Strickland told the media after his victory. “He just had that threatening demeanour. And maybe that’s like the little man inside me but when he’s threatening me I’m like ‘I want to f—ing murder you, I want to kill you.’

“Maybe he didn’t take it that way, maybe it’s his Chechen sense of humour. But in the gym, he was always trying to, like, punk me. I was like ‘let’s go spar’ and we would never go spar.

“So I could have manufactured the whole situation in my head to be honest. There are times when you’re mentally not well you’ll have interactions with people and sometimes your brain thinks something else happened.

“You have to sit back and be like ‘wait wait wait’. That’s why I like training and train so much, there’ll be times where I have an interaction with somebody and my brain hallucinates the entire interaction. So there’s a chance that I just hallucinated that entire interaction with Chimaev.”