Vettori takes media to task for focusing on Jake Paul: ‘It’s just disrespectful’
Marvin Vettori is tired of the media trying to make Jake Paul into a legitimate fighter.
UFC middleweight contender Marvin Vettori will headline this weekend’s event against Kevin Holland, but there might not be a ton of focus on that. Why? Because the following weekend, there is a high-profile Triller event featuring former ONE and Bellator champion Ben Askren taking on YouTube star Jake Paul in a boxing match. And Vettori doesn’t like it one bit.
In an interview with MMA Fighting, Vettori slammed the media for giving so much attention to a non-fighter, believing it to be disrespectful to legitimate combatants like himself:
“It’s bad, it’s disrespectful The most disrespectful is also this bullsh-t ass media that I’ve seen all over where they give him credit. With media, it’s a give and take, but at the end of the day the silver lining of every media should be informing. It’s lost. It’s lost by far in general. It could be anything. It could news, it could be MMA. It could be anything. It’s kind of sad to see this.
“They’re just after any kind of clickbait to put on the news, and the content is just sh-t and it’s getting sh-ttier. It’s sad.”
He made it clear that gaining a little bit of fame shouldn’t mean that you deserve the attention in the fight game:
“To see that people are just jumping on some YouTube like that,” Vettori said. “It’s just sad. There’s people out there who have been giving their whole life to this game, and this guy has been f—king around with other little kids until he came a little famous. Then to try to jump into fighting other [YouTubers], whatever it is, not fighters and picking and choosing. Even just making more money, it’s just disrespectful.”
Vettori vs. Holland is the main event of UFC on ABC 2, which goes down April 10th in Vegas.