Last September, Paulo Filho said he will beat Gegard Mousasi and if by some freak of nature he loses, dude didn’t want to get paid for it. Mousasi retaliated by calling Paul Filho a ‘little donkey on steroids‘. The fight never took place but thanks to Tatame Magazine, we all know what it’s like when a Brazilian talks smack to an Armenian guy and then translates it to English.
After Paulo Filho’s only lost in his MMA career against Chael Sonnen, he got really depressed and started drinking alcohol faster than my old Irish roommate. My old roommate did nothing to squash the whole ‘Irish people drink excessively’ stereotype. Not at all. The dude gripped 40oz of Mickey’s like Conan the Barbarian gripped two handed battle-axes. The only thing that came between him and his beer was a concussion from collapsing in our parking lot. That’s right around the area Paulo Filho inhabited after his WEC lost against Sonnen. He started to get really depressed and it forced him to undergo an entire year in rehab.
During the bout, Paulo Filho repeatedly whispered something in Chael Sonnen’s ear that has been debated for years. In an interview with the Wrestling Observer, Chael Sonnen finally tells us what Filho said that night in November.
“He had asked me at one point in the fight to go to the ground with him and I said ‘No, I can’t do that’ and he said, ‘no, no submission attempts, just rest, come to the ground, let’s rest‘ and I just said again, ‘I can’t’ and just went back to fighting.”
The rematch was actually scheduled to take place in November of 2008 but Filho had to drop out of the bout to check into a substance abuse rehab facility. If you watch WEC 36 again, you’ll notice that throughout the fight, Filho looked like a kid lost in a grocery store. Filho came into the fight overweight and the title-fight that was initially scheduled was reverted to a three-round, non-title bout. A few months later, WEC discontinued their middleweight division which means Filho’s belt is somewhere in Brazil next to his collection of cut-off flannels. [Source]
