"It just upsets me that people are taking to the blogs and their websites to directly attack the coaching as being the factor in what happened. There's a lot of things that made that outcome. It wasn't one person's fault. It wasn't his fault, it wasn't the referee's fault. It was a combination of a lot of things that led for this to happen. All we can do is take precautions and be safer next time. The thing that gets to me is that they're attacking guys that I look at as fatherly figures. My family, to me. This is a family here. When you attack one of us you attack all of us. I'm not getting too personal with it The truth will come out and then people will see how it is. For every bad story there's 100 people training in the gym that love the culture and love what's going on here. Everybody knows how Duke is. Duke's not hiding, he's doing interviews. He's talking to the media. The story was one-sided. We didn't address that story at all so it was one side. They can make it look however they want but the saddest thing is Denis dying. That's what it should be about."
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight titleholder Anthony Pettis (via MMA Fighting) comes to the defense of longtime coach Duke Roufus, who was lambasted by the media earlier this week after a report linked the death of amateur kickboxer Dennis Munson Jr. to the Roufusport camp, once voted "America's Top MMA Gym." Pettis argues that any and all reports about the Roufusport gym culture have been completely one-sided and "Showtime" expects the truth to come out. But will that "truth" refute the complaints from past and present UFC fighters with not-so-kind words for Roufus and Co.? Time will tell.
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