Paddy Pimblett recently decided to share his side of a recent controversy he was involved in, where he ignored the tap and attempted to choke someone unconscious. Footage of Pimblett beating fellow MMA fighter Denis Frimpong in his own gym went viral recently, and it was reportedly done to settle some beef between the two men. It’s not uncommon for professional fighters to have public disagreements of course, but settling them in unsanctioned fights behind closed doors isn’t done very often in the modern era. Pimblett got the upper hand in their fight and it wasn’t long before he took Frimpong’s back amd locked up a rear-naked choke.
That’s when the controversy started though, as Frimpong tapped and Paddy Pimblett didn’t release the choke. Pimblett explained exactly why he did that:
“We both agreed, we don’t stop until someone’s unconscious. Taps don’t count. Quitting to strikes doesn’t count. We just go until someone’s out cold.”
He also shared a little background on what happened immediately before the fight and his perspective on how it unfolded too:
“Got up, drove to Manchester Top Team, we were in and out within 15 minutes. Walked in the middle, said, ‘Let’s do this.’ To be honest, I think he gave me the choke. He stuck his neck out to give me the choke because he didn’t want to get flattened out and ground-and-pounded until he was unconscious. I took the choke, and as we all know, if you get choked unconscious, you just wake back up.”
Pimbkett went on to say that the approach to the fight was mutual too:
“A lot of people saying I’ve got no honor, I’ve got not this, I’ve got no that. I’ve seen Denis say in an interview since, ‘If I would have knocked him unconscious, I would have jumped on him and landed a few more strikes.’ All is fair in love and war.”
Although the video did spark controversy, there was a lot more to the fight than just the footage of it unfolding and Paddy Pimblett shared exactly why it came to that in the first place:
”He was bullying two of the lads who come to my gym, Jake and George, who are like my little brothers. I train with them every day. I had something against him just for that anyway. As you all know, I don’t like bullies. And then when he fought George in the final of the comp, he was saying mad stuff to George, saying, ‘Your grandma’s going to hell’, well, in hell, because his grandma’s dead. … All that stuff rubbed me up the wrong way.”
It wasn’t just his training partners that Frimpong took aim at either:
“My (strength and conditioning) coach Paul Reed, who’s like my uncle, he commented on it saying this is embarrassing. And Denis put back to him, ‘You stick to S and C, old man. Leave the fighters to fight.’ That was it. I went at him, I couldn’t help it. We kept going back and forth, I ended up saying, come on, let’s get a spar on. Let’s do it.”
Pimblett also talked about what happened after the fight with Frimpong, and that he was actually interested in a second round:
“I stood back up and went to the corner and just said, ‘Come ahead, let’s go again from the feet. You said you wanted to strike. Let’s go again from the feet. And Denis come over and said, ‘No. I’m done. I don’t want to go again.’ And then we shook hands like men.”
Now that the incident has come and gone, Pimblett says that the score is settled:
“We all know the truth. Me and Denis have shook hands, it’s done. We both agreed to never speak about it again. Simple as. End of.”
Paddy Pimblett shared his side of the controversy arpund him ignoring the tap in a recent video uploaded to his official YouTube channel:
