The UFC may be as real as it gets, but Chael Sonnen brilliantly approached the league from a character-driven, professional wrestling perspective. When he and Wanderlei Silva were opposing coaches on The Ultimate Fighter 3: Brazil, Sonnen intended to play the heel to Wand's babyface. However, Silva didn't get with the program, and ultimately the Brazilian fans were cheering the Gangster from Oregon, much to Sonnen's displeasure.
A central moment in the storyline was an on-set scuffle between the pair, the authenticity of which has been in dispute since it happened in 2014. Sonnen says it was real.
“I had a fight with Wanderlei Silva a number of years ago on the set of The Ultimate Fighter 3: Brazil,” said Sonnen, as transcribed by Steven Rae for Body Lock MMA. “A clip has resurfaced – Fight Pass has put it out as part of the memorable moments list. So that resurfaced… My producer was asking me to tell the story.
“So incase nobody seen the clip, Wanderlei and I were on the set of the Ultimate Fighter – you know how that looks, he was in his team’s jersey, I was in my team’s jersey – but it’s just us in a room. All of the athletes were just behind a little door of the set waiting to come out, but that was part of the shot that was being set up.
“Well they’re still through the door so it is just Wanderlei and I. And I hated that this happened and I resented Wanderlei tremendously for a while, I do not now.
“The reason I resented him was at the time I went to Brazil – this was right off the back of me having a very big and public dispute with Anderson Silva of which I took all the way to the Brazilian people. I even brought Anderson Silva’s family into it, this thing got nasty. And the Brazilian people were very loyal to Anderson and there was just heat, there was just heat at the highest of levels to when I was there, I was receiving death threats and people were promising to find out where I was.”
“There was supposed to be huge tension between Wanderlei and I, and there just wasn’t. Now there wasn’t because his way of choosing to deal with me – who he hated at that time and saw as a terrible guy – was to just not. No contact. If I passed him I would just say ‘hello,’ it was just a habit, I don’t know if I could pass anybody that I know and not say hi. He would try to ignore me and because of his approach, there was no interaction.
“I would always find a way to take a dig at Wanderlei, that was the character I was playing, I would always take a dig at him. So I did that to irritate him to get him to have some kind of exchange with me because that was a piece of the program. Now whether I was smart to do that or a jerk to do that as he viewed it, this is still what happened.”
“Production went back to Wanderlei and said ‘quit straight-arming this guy, quit ignoring him, he is trying to engage you. As a matter of fact, here are some things he has said about you behind your back that you don’t know about.
“So he decided premeditately that he was going to use this opportunity when it was just him and I to confront me. Now instead of doing what I think production would have liked, which is just some engaging some verbal banter, it turned physical. And I could feel this coming.”
“And I don’t think this [makes me a] coward, but the idea of fighting Wanderlei Silva isn’t really on my list of fun things to do, and life in general. But the idea of fighting Wanderlei Silva without gloves, without a weigh-in, without a referee, when everybody else through them doors likes him and none of them like me; this is really low on my list of things to do. But I have an ego too. And if this is going to happen, whatever happens, happens.
“A very light scuffle breaks out, the guy’s all came through and everybody rips us apart and breaks it up. Whatever did happen and whatever you did see was very real and very authentic, he was very worked up for his own reasons. I was very calm and not wanting it to happen for his own reasons.”
"When I look back on that Wanderlei thing, I don’t really care about the scuffle or who the perceived winner was, or who was the aggressor – I don’t really care about that. I would like the story told that we were not working together, the producers were not scripting drama, we just happened to have microphones on.”
The pair finally fought, for Bellator MMA, on June 24, 2017 with Sonnen winning a Unanimous Decision.
So that's the truth - the scuffle was real.
Or was it?
