Chael Sonnen labels Wanderlei Silva and Ronda Rousey as aggressive bullies

With two weeks left before their showdown at Madison Square Garden, Chael Sonnen is ready to fight Wanderlei Silva ... if "The Axe Murderer" shows up, that is. The Brazilian fighter has missed out on two press conferences Bellator has held to promote their pay-per-view event on June 24th, appearing via telephone on the first and calling in sick on the second. Via FloCombat:

"I'm not positive he is coming," Sonnen said. "I will be there. I gave my word and will be there no matter what happens, but I don't know about him. In baseball you have the three strike rule, and he already has two strikes against him. We had a press conference and he skipped it. We did another press conference and he skipped that as well. The only thing left is the fight."

As far as Chael is concerned, Wanderlei is nothing but a bully that has never known how to react to Sonnen's relentless calling out. The topic got philosophical as Sonnen went into the nature of what he considers a fight to be, throwing Ronda Rousey under the bus in the process.

"Somewhere along the line the word 'fighter' became corrupted in my lifetime," he declared. "It used to be about who could get up and move forward when the chips were down. Who could get up and move forward when it was the toughest thing to do. That's what a fighter was, but now I have no idea what the kids of today would define a fighter as.

"I read some stuff that Ronda put out, and I'm a personal fan of hers, but I was stunned at some of the stuff I read. It had me sitting there saying, 'Ronda, you're not a fighter. You understand one thing and that's aggression. When someone is standing there who sucks, you understand how to attack that person. That is called aggression.'

"Fighting is when it's hard. Fighting is when that person is coming back at you with equal or greater resistance. That's what a fighter is, and when it doesn't go your way and you want to stay in bed in the morning, when that alarm goes off you get your ass up, put your boots on and you go face the world. That's what a fighter does."

As usual with Chael Sonnen's statements, there's an angle of truth to this and a whole whopping slice of bulls**t as well. The truth: Rousey enjoyed herself immensely during the period of time where she cut through the women's division like a hot knife through butter, and then disappeared the moment she ran into fighters that could hit back.

But let's not forget that Rousey's Olympic caliber combat sports career goes back all the way to 2004 when she was 17. And during that period, she undoubtedly faced a ton of adversity through those years and still managed to truck on and earn herself a huge pile of medals and championships. Just because she got rich enough to walk away from the fight game doesn't diminish the time period where she was undoubtedly a fighter in Sonnen’s terms of the word.

But hey, it wouldn't be a Chael Sonnen interview with these kinds of Chael Sonnen comments.