Urijah Faber was Ariel Helwani’s guest today on the MMA Hour and he really unloaded on former Team Alpha Male striking coach Duane “Bang” Ludwig. MMA Fighting has the transcription.
“…first off, Duane refused to work with any females. He said, ‘I just want to tell you, I’m not supportive of women’s MMA. I won’t be working with anybody, I won’t be working with Paige (VanZant), I’m not going to be working with Nicky, I’m not going to work with Veronica. I don’t believe in it.’ Okay. That was an issue.
“The second thing was, he was saying racial things. And that’s what I’m saying when I say, things aren’t jokes just because you laughed at them, especially if they’re hurtful. So I had two of the African-American guys on our team who approached me and said, ‘this is getting real uncomfortable. It’s funny one time, I guess, when he says stuff like, all the black guys at the end of the line. But he’s saying it every single day.’ Then one guy says, ‘every single time I’m in the gym and I’m talking to a girl, Duane yells across the gym, hey, so-and-so, all black guys 25 feet away from the females.’ He says, ‘I get it, he thinks it’s funny, whatever. But he keeps doing it and it’s really getting on my nerves.’
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“So I had to talk Duane about that. I had to talk to him about the girls. I had to talk to him about not breaking people down. One girl from Alaska said that Duane keeps saying, ‘you’re pretty terrible and you should just quit.’ She goes, ‘he starts laughing like he’s joking but I know he’s serious.’ She wasn’t the best girl on the team, and it was mean is what it was. So I had to talk to him about that.”
There’s much much more at MMA Fighting.
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