Jose Torres was one of the first flyweights to get his walking papers after news broke of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) making plans to do away with the division in the coming months.
“Shorty,” the former flyweight and bantamweight champion for Titan FC, says the fact that he didn’t even get the option to hang around and move up to the 135-pound division is downright disrespectful.
“When we talked to Mick, he said they would bump some guys up, so I said cool. I was the Titan FC Bantamweight champion, half of my professional career, four of my eight wins are in the bantamweight division, two world championships as an amateur and the majority of my amateur career was at 135,” he said on a recent interview on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show.
“So I have shown I can compete with some of the best. So he (Mick Maynard) said, ‘Nah, your last fight you lost. It’s okay, we don’t want you.’ I was not given the option and it sucks because I have worked so hard to be able to accomplish some of the things that I have, and I get no, in a sense, respect for it.”
Despite Dana White revealing the promotion is “working on some things” for the state of the division, Torres says his management team was told it will, in fact, be dissolved in the coming months.
Going 1-1 in his lone two fights inside the Octagon, Torres say he knows he has the skills to hang with the best at 135 pounds, and really wanted a chance to prove himself.
“Frustration sets in because I have accomplished so much at both divisions and that is something I wanted to do in the UFC, possibly be a double weight class champion. And not because Conor did it or ‘DC’ did it, but because I have done it already in Titan FC. I really do believe I could do it again, but I just wasn’t given the opportunity. 100-percent I would’ve (taken the opportunity). I’ve even told Mick that I would rather take a last-minute fight at 135.”
Nevertheless, Torres says he has been in talks with other promotions such as ONE, Rizin and Bellator about future employment, so now it just remains to be seen where he lands.
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