- Israel Adesanya opened up about his faceoff with Dricus du Plessis at UFC 290
- Izzy was impressed by Mark Zuckerberg’s toughness
- The middleweight champ addressed his recent encounter with Jon Jones
Israel Adesanya had a lot of remarkable encounters lately. He made an impromptu faceoff with his next title challenger Dricus du Plessis at UFC 290, had the chance to coach Mark Zuckerberg and even crossed paths with Jon Jones, whom he had a beef with in the past.
In a recent video on his YouTube channel, “The Last Stylebender” talked about all of it.
It didn’t need to happen
According to Adesanya, the intense faceoff with Du Plessis after the UFC 290 main event wasn’t meant to end that way. However, once he came face-to-face with “Stillknocks,” his emotions just took over.
“He worked hard. I manifest for myself and I make sure I do the work to get that manifestation right,” Adesanya explained. “It’s not just sit there and ‘Kumbaya.’ What’s going to happen? I do the work. Trust me. There’s levels… It’s frustrating. No, it’s not really frustrating. I just feel sorry for the people to be honest. I’m just like, ‘Oh, you’re not tapping into these things and it’s just available to us constantly. So, yeah. When it happened I was just like, ‘F**k, yes!’… And I was urging them all, come on forward! Even at the prep point, I was giving him energy. Like f*ck yeah – positive affirmations, like ‘Let’s go.’ But yeah, when it happened, I just lost my sh*t.”
Zuck was tough
Zuckerberg has been busy prepping up for his much-awaited fight with Elon Musk. He recently linked up with Adesanya and the pair worked together for a training session.
Contrary to what many thought, Izzy said he didn’t take Zuck lightly. Instead, the training was intense.
“I put it on him. I wanted him to feel the pressure of what it would be like to have a bigger man going after him so I wasn’t like nice to him,” Adesanya said of Zuckerberg. “I was coaching it was kind of like a crash course in fighting so I was coaching him as we were going along and he was a smart man I’ll tell you he’s a smart man.
“And I was impressed with afterwards he’d be like, because I think I’d be done with him, he’d be like, ‘Israel, can we go another round?’ I’m like, ‘Sure!’ And he would just sit down afterwards and he’s like can we go another round like, ‘Oh, sh*t!’ Like I said, I wasn’t being easy on him… he’s a gamer. I like that. He’s tenacious. He’s like a Jack Russell. A feisty Jack Russell,” he added.
🏆🏆🏆
No fugazi with Mark 🦈
This is Serious Business‼️ pic.twitter.com/nraS4DrvuO— Israel Adesanya (@stylebender) July 11, 2023
The beef was squashed
Adesanya also crossed paths with Jones at a casino during his UFC 290 weekend in Las Vegas. The fellow UFC champions blew the internet away with their epic encounter.
Looks like it's all love between Israel Adesanya and Jon Jones 😅
(via @stylebender) pic.twitter.com/v3ZydqcybS
— ESPN MMA (@espnmma) July 6, 2023
Some say it was staged but Izzy insists it wasn’t as he could’ve been somewhere else when he ran into “Bones.” More importantly, Adesanya confirmed that their beef was already squashed.
“I said it’s no one’s business like when I posted about [it], I was like it’s between me and him. That’s it, but it definitely wasn’t a fake encounter, I think it was a divine intervention,” Adesanya pointed out. “I honestly do. Because I feel like there are so many timelines that could have ended up just differently.”
“We have understanding and common ground, we’re just competitors, bro,” Izzy said after declaring his feud with Jones is over. “It’s like, why should I hate my brother? I went deep into my YouTube comments, and everyone was like, ‘That made me smile, I was smiling so hard watching this,’ and giving people that feeling watching us spar and play around, it was like, is this what world peace would feel like? Imagine world peace when people aren’t at war, people aren’t fighting, that’s what it felt like.”
Adesanya even revealed that he and Jones are already working on training together in the future.
“We definitely will. It’s in the works. It will happen,” he said.
Adesanya is set to defend his middleweight title against Du Plessis. Nothing is concrete yet but it is believed that they will headline UFC 293 in September.
