Kelvin Gastelum looked at the Jackson McVey vs. Wes Schultz staredown before UFC Sacramento and wanted the room to stop laughing. McVey and Schultz turned their ceremonial face-off into the famous Spider-Man pointing meme, which was funny enough for plenty of fans, but Gastelum saw it as the kind of gag that makes the fight game look a little too loose.
The middleweight bout sits on the undercard of the Anthony Hernandez vs. Gregory Rodrigues card at Golden 1 Center, so this was not some random regional weigh-in where everyone is already half in on the bit. It was UFC fight week, cameras were rolling, and two guys who apparently know exactly how similar they look decided to lean into it.
Watch the face-off clip below:
Gastelum Did Not Love The Joke
Gastelum’s issue was not complicated. The former UFC interim title challenger said the sport used to make room for staredowns where fighters could feel the danger standing across from them, and he did not like seeing a high-level MMA matchup turned into a meme before the cage door even closed.
“This sport has come a long way. We used to have real face offs where you feel and see the gawk in each fighter’s face that would melt a tank. Fighting MMA at the highest level is not a joke and shouldn’t be taken as so. Lessons to be learned will be hard for these two.”
Here is Gastelum’s post reacting to the clip:
There is a real split here, and honestly, both sides are easy to understand. MMA fans love a bit because the sport is already absurd enough to make grown adults strip to their underwear, hydrate like maniacs, and mean-mug under sponsor lights. The Spider-Man thing landed because McVey and Schultz really did have the same long-hair, middleweight mirror-match energy going on.
Gastelum is also not exactly shouting from the cheap seats. He has been around enough ugly nights to know that fight-week comfort can turn into a nasty lesson fast. Schultz and McVey have history too, with Schultz submitting McVey in 41 seconds when they met as amateurs in 2020, so the rematch already had a sharper edge than the laugh suggested.
Schultz vs. McVey is scheduled as a 185-pound matchup before a Sacramento card built around middleweight stakes, from the Hernandez-Rodrigues main event to the wider churn around contenders trying to get noticed. That is why a small weigh-in gag blew up so quickly. In a sport where a single clip can become the whole pre-fight story, the joke can get more attention than the actual fight.
Gastelum was recently pulled into the Noche UFC shuffle after Kelvin Gastelum’s exit, so he is not even on this card. He still jumped in because fighters tend to treat these rituals like part of the job. Handshakes, shove attempts, dead-eyed staring, goofy bits, all of it tells the audience what kind of heat they are supposed to feel.
Now McVey and Schultz get the fun part and the dangerous part at the same time. They got the viral clip, they got the former title challenger scolding them, and now they have to fight like the whole joke did not steal the lead before either man threw a punch.
