It’s a sentence that nobody could have ever predicted they’d be hearing, but Nate Diaz has decided to endorse BJ Penn in his run for governor of Hawaii. The main surprise of course, is that Penn is actually running for governor in the first place. Penn has had several run-ins with the law over the last few years, around the same time that his MMA career began to fall off the pace and he eventually retired from the sport altogether. Regardless, he still remains an incredibly popular figure in his home-state of Hawaii thanks to his status as a two-weight UFC world champion and member of the UFC Hall of Fame.
That’s why his announcement at the end of 2021 that he was running for governor of Hawaii was met with a relatively warm reception. He has plenty of fans willing to vote for him to begin with and his initial message was one rallying against the state and federal mandates that many Americans were unhappy with during that time. The fact that Nate Diaz has decided to support BJ Penn in his run shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise in itself however, seeing as both men are UFC veterans and have been competing at the highest levels of the sport around the same time. Despite competing in the same divisions for their entire career Nate Diaz and BJ Penn never actually met in the cage, although Penn did once drop a decision to his older brother Nick at Welterweight.
“I just talked to BJ Penn earlier. Shoutout to BJ Penn. Let’s all vote for BJ Penn to be…uh…governor of Hawaii. Let’s all donate to my guy BJ Penn. He is doing fundraisers right now or some shit like that. It don’t matter—I’m with BJ Penn.”
A clip of the interview that Nate Diaz gave to Ariel Helwani where he discussed BJ Penn and his run for Governor of Hawaii can be seen below, but the full interview is over an hour long and was uploaded to the official YouTube channel for MMAFighting on SBN.
Nate Diaz endorses BJ Penn for governor #TheMMAHour pic.twitter.com/52ZPUfKrI8
— Borrachinha Depot (@FullContactMTWF) July 13, 2022
