Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has a tendency to rob Peter to pay Paul.
After multi-division contender Anthony Pettis went down with a knee injury, officials scrambled to find him a replacement for featherweight champion Jose Aldo in the UFC 163 pay-per-view (PPV) main event, scheduled for Aug. 17, 2013 at HSBC Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
There was just one problem.
Both of the division's top title contenders, Chan Sung Jung and Ricardo Lamas, were booked to face off against one another at the upcoming UFC 162 event on July 6 at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. That means somebody is getting screwed in "Sin City" (hint: it's not the "Korean Zombie").
But the news wasn't all sour.
Jung -- who told UFC Tonight "The Bully" deserved first dibs -- "feels bad" as he moves on to face "Junior" in August, while Lamas will be yanked from the card altogether and receive his "show" money, which at last count, was around the $20,000 mark. Not exactly a windfall, but not awful for doing absolutely nothing on fight night.
And at 13-2, he's likely to get the winner of "Zombie" vs. Aldo.
The absence of Jung vs. Lamas also opened the door for the middleweight scrap between Mark Munoz vs. Tim Boetsch. "The Filipino Wrecking Machine" was originally scheduled to fight "The Barbarian" on the FX-televised "Prelims," but has since been promoted to the PPV main card (see the new line up here).
All's well that ends well, I suppose.