The biggest fight in Featherweight history is around the corner, but it was supposed to take place a few months ago. Jose Aldo suffered a terrible rib injury and had to pull out of the fight on short notice. Aldo was replaced by Chad Mendes, who was finished by McGregor, and the rest is history.
The infamous image of Aldo’s injured rib that he released, which Dana White claimed was fake.
At the time, Dana White went on a media tear claiming that Jose’s injury wasn’t actually that bad, that his rib wasn’t actually broken, etc. Aldo posted a picture of the X-Ray, White said it was fake, and so on and so forth. With the fight finally set to take place Saturday and both fighters safely making it out of training camp without any major injuries (knock on wood), Jose Aldo’s wife has revealed that not only was Dana White trying to bully Jose Aldo into putting his belt on the line despite a terrible injury in public, but he was also pressuring him privately as well. Dana White has a lot more power in the media in North American than Jose Aldo does, so Dana can hop on a few talk shows and say whatever he wants and Aldo won’t really have a chance to defend himself.
Vivianne, Jose, and Dana.
Here’s what Jose Aldo’s wife, Vivianne Pereira, said to Combate:
“Aldo was really injured, there’s video of it. The guy threw a spinning kick, hit his left rib and broke it. ‘Dede’ [Andre Pederneiras, Aldo’s head coach] called me half an hour after going to the hospital to ask me to stay calm because they didn’t know if it was broken. We didn’t want to frighten anyone because we didn’t know if he would fight or not. After a while, ‘Dede’ calls me and say it’s broken and he would need three or four weeks to get back. It was two weeks before the fight, we were desperate.”
According to Vivianne, Dana White was trying everything to convince Aldo to take the fight:
“And Dana calling, talking about numbers,” she said. “‘It’s millions of dollars that you are losing. You have to fight. You never made this in your life’. Junior trying everything, doing everything. But they didn’t want to announce it because who else would they put in the fight? They spent millions on the fight. How would they say he broke his rib? They didn’t want to admit, they held it back, threw that on us, and we were saying it was broken.
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