'Staring me down!'…Daniel Cormier admits he nearly beat up a rival wrestling coach in recent heated altercation
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A high school wrestling coach nearly made a horrific mistake in provoking UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier into a fight.
UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier, five years removed from the end of his fighting career, is still someone you don’t want to make angry. During his physical prime, he dismantled some of the top light heavyweights and heavyweights in UFC history, on the way to winning championships in two different divisions.
Cormier is a top UFC analyst and one of the most respected high school wrestling coaches in the United States since hanging up the gloves. In addition to his common appearances on UFC broadcasts, he’s the head coach for the Gilroy (CA.) High School wrestling team.
While preparing his kids for a major wrestling tournament just days ago, a coach at another school nearly tried to fight Cormier before cooler heads eventually prevailed. The intervention prevented the ego-centric coach from sustaining heavy damage from the former UFC star.
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Daniel Cormier nearly made an egocentric wrestling coach pay the price for bullying tactics
In a recent edition of Good Guy/Bad Guy with Chael Sonnen, Cormier shared how a recent altercation with a wrestling coach nearly turned ugly.
“It’s happened to me quite a bit recently. I was at a tournament in Clovis, and a great friend of mine, I asked him to use the wrestling room,” Cormier said. “One of the other coaches goes into the wrestling room, sees [my team] in there…he’s mad, throws them out. I go to him and say ‘Hey man, what happened?’. And dude starts getting mad at me! Big guy, this guy has to be 300 pounds, tall, he wants to beat my butt. I’ve never met this guy a day in my life and he wants to kick my butt. But you know, even if it’s not a thing, when he and I are talking and we’re kind of nose-to-nose and chatting, and they come over to try to stop it, that makes it a thing. Even if it’s not an argument, the perception is that these guys are about to fight, because other people are around.
“It broke up, and I said to my friend ‘I respect your opinion. But, this guy, I don’t care’. Really pisses him off,” Cormier continued. “So we’re walking between the gyms…comes up to me again and I was staring him down…and I said ‘Everybody wants to be a tough guy until you have to do tough guy stuff. You’re only doing this because you know, that I can’t do to you what I want to do to you’…and I wanted to kick his butt! And he said ‘You’re gonna try!’. You’re gonna try? I thought to myself that this guy had to be a police officer because the only way he would treat me this way was to know I can’t put my hands on him. It was one of the worst instances where someone tried to goad me into fighting them.”
Despite retiring from the Octagon in 2020, Cormier has gotten into several beefs out of the cage since making the full-time move to broadcasting. He and UFC welterweight Joaquin Buckley got into a public feud over Cormier’s public criticism of Buckley’s recent Conor McGregor callout.
Daniel Cormier is not a man you want to mess with
During his fighting career, Cormier defeated the likes of Stipe Miocic, Derrick Lewis, Alexander Gustafsson, and Dan Henderson inside the cage. He became one of the few UFC stars to win championships in multiple divisions, and just the second UFC simultaneous two-division titleholder in the promotion’s history.
Cormier entered the UFC Hall of Fame in 2022 alongside his longtime friend and teammate Khabib Nurmagomedov. Amidst the ongoing all-time pound-for-pound debate, Cormier’s name is a forgotten name that deserves to be in the mix.
Luckily, Cormier didn’t have to use what he learned in MMA against a mouthy rival wrestling coach, and tensions quickly simmered. But the unnamed coach might want to think twice before trying to bully one of the most dangerous men on the planet.
