Arman Tsarukyan is supposed to be wrestling Dillon Danis on Friday night. Listening to him this week, you’d think he had something else in mind. Ahead of their RAF 14 headliner at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, the UFC lightweight hinted that he may ignore the Real American Freestyle ruleset and throw elbows, a tool that has no place in a wrestling match and every place in the kind of message he seems intent on sending.
Tsarukyan made his feelings plain in an interview with MMA Fighting, as Bloody Elbow reported. He gave Danis a little credit, conceding “he is a good grappler,” then tore into his wrestling and called him “the worst fighter ever in MMA.” He said Danis understands nothing about MMA and offered to correct that himself. “Maybe (I’ll teach him) with one or two elbows,” Tsarukyan said.
That would be a lot easier to wave off as fight-week noise if the two hadn’t already put hands on each other. At Thursday’s pre-event press conference, the pair brawled on stage after Tsarukyan objected to a T-shirt Danis wore, which was meant as a shot at Khamzat Chimaev. Security had to get involved. RAF, for its part, posted footage of the moment the room turned, captioned “Right before it got spicy,” which tells you how the promotion feels about all this.
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The RAF ruleset caps how much damage one wrestler can do to another. That limit only holds if both men respect it, and the history here gives reason to doubt they will. A few months ago Tsarukyan brawled with Georgio Poullas after their RAF match. A similar scene played out after Chimaev beat Danis in 44 seconds. Danis, the controversial former Bellator fighter, has a long relationship with chaos outside his fights, and rules have a way of bending when he’s in the building.
Tsarukyan arrives in good form. He’s been using RAF to stay sharp between UFC appearances, and Friday comes just over a month after his win over Mauricio Ruffy in the Octagon.
The card behind him is stacked with names from both wrestling and MMA. Chimaev, the man whose name sparked Thursday’s scuffle, returns to the mat against Robbie Lawler. Jordan Burroughs, Brendan Allen, Pat Downey, Bella Mir and Juan Archuleta also appear on the undercard. With Chimaev and Danis in the same venue a few months after their own post-match mess, RAF’s security staff should probably skip dinner.
My take: Tsarukyan doesn’t need elbows, and he knows it. The most humiliating thing a wrestler of his caliber can do to a man who trades on his jiu-jitsu credentials is take him down over and over, hold him there and make him carry the weight for the whole match. Elbows would hand Danis an excuse and a story to tell. A clean, grinding wrestling beating leaves him nothing to say. RAF 14 airs Friday, October 23, at 9 p.m. ET on Fox Nation, and Tsarukyan will decide soon enough which lesson he’d rather teach.
