Old teammates Sean Strickland and Tatiana Suarez both challenge for titles at UFC 312.
Earlier in their careers, the two shared the mats at Millennia MMA in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. While Strickland now calls XTreme Couture in Las Vegas home, this Saturday at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney (ESPN+ pay-per-view, ESPN2, ESPN+), he has a reunion of sorts with Suarez as they share top billing of the February pay-per-view event.
For better or worse, that reunion brings story time from Strickland, who rematches Dricus Du Plessis for the middleweight title in the main event. The subject of Strickland’s tales was Suarez, who hopes to capture the strawweight title by defeating Zhang Weili in the co-main event.
“I love Tatiana, dude. You want to talk about the short bus, my man?” Strickland said with a laugh during the UFC 312 media day. “Tatiana’s not dumb. Like, she’s a college graduate, guys. I didn’t even go to elementary school, alright. I literally completed like three years – not even completed. I went to school for like three years of my life. Tatiana has that magic, bro. She has that autism magic that just transcends into this beast of a wrestler.”
“I’ll tell you when I knew Tatiana was autistic for the first time. This is a true story. I was at Millennia, and I was saying something, and I don’t know if it was funny or not, but she started laughing like 30 seconds after the joke was said. And we all kind of looked at Tatiana like, ‘What’s up?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, that was a funny joke.’ We’re just like (thumbs up).”
There’s no evidence that supports Strickland’s claim of Suarez being autistic, but that doesn’t mean he won’t thoughtlessly place that label on her. This is Strickland we’re talking about here, after all.
However, accompanying that unqualified diagnosis is a veiled compliment, as is often the case with the former middleweight champion.
“I mean, you guys know she’s definitely on the spectrum, right?” Strickland said. “But again, I feel bad for Weili. Like, you’re fighting a f*cking – you’re fighting an idiot savant of MMA. So it’s like it’s real f*cking bad, dude.”
Storytime with Strickland wasn’t over there. He recalled witnessing a time on the mats at Millenna MMA where Suarez went hard on a sparring opponent and cursed at her coach.
“She has this motherf*cker in full mount, just dropping hell on this guy,” Strickland said. “Her coach at the time, a guy named Betiss (Mansouri), real lazy f*cker. I mean she’s dropping heat, and Betiss is like, ‘Woah, Tatiana. Chill out.’ Dropping the heat, she looks at him, ‘F*ck you Betiss!’ And just keeps f*cking blasting this guy’s face.
“So, it’s like dude, Tatiana’s a scary b*tch, dude. Straight scary. I mean, she was a f*cking man, I’d have to shoot her.”
