This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
When UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre defends his title against Nick Diaz on March 16 in Montreal, it will be the climactic scene of a saga that has played out over nearly two years. A recap:
ACT ONE: May 2011. St-Pierre has just dispatched Jake Shields at the organization’s first stadium event in Toronto. Suddenly, the UFC finds itself short on 170-lb. fighters to challenge the longtime champ. President Dana White recruits Diaz, Strikeforce’s welterweight title-holder, to shake things up. The rebel from the mean streets of Stockton, Calif., is the perfect bad-boy foil to St-Pierre’s polite Canadian persona. While many UFC fans love GSP for his impeccable character, Diaz is not without his own fan following, who dig his truculent demeanour. The champion vs. champion, hero vs. heel matchup is set for October 2011, and there’s no shortage of hype.
Unfortunately, things don’t unfold as planned. Diaz goes too far in his defiant ways, skirting his promotional duties. He is replaced by Carlos Condit and pitted instead against B.J. Penn. Then St-Pierre is injured in training, postponing his matchup with Condit until February and relegating him to spectator at the October fight. After defeating Penn at UFC 137, Diaz exclaims, “Where you at Georges?” and suggests GSP wasn’t really injured but afraid to fight.
According to White, the normally affable champ immediately asks to fight Diaz instead of Condit, saying, “He’s the most disrespectful human being I’ve ever met and I’m going to put the worst beating you’ve ever seen on him in the UFC.”
ACT TWO: December 2011. The much-anticipated matchup is again scuttled when St-Pierre tears his ACL and has to step away from the cage indefinitely. In February 2012, Diaz fights Condit for an interim belt, loses and is subsequently suspended from fighting for a year after testing positive for marijuana metabolites. To add to the drama, Diaz also suggests he might retire. Two of the UFC’s most magnetic characters seem destined never to meet.
ACT THREE: November 2012. St-Pierre beats Condit at UFC 154 in Montreal in his long-awaited return to the cage. The consummate company man, always willing to put his title on the line against whomever the UFC chooses, has his next opponent firmly in mind. Rather than fight consensus No. 1 contender Johny Hendricks or fellow pound-for-pound star Anderson Silva in what would surely be a huge payday, St-Pierre is determined to settle unfinished business. “I want to fight Nick Diaz,” he says. “It’s the fight that everybody wants to see, including me and him.”
And so the stage is set for St-Pierre to lead a contingent of seven other Canadians—including Nick Ring and Mike Ricci on the main card—into the Bell Centre at UFC 158. He can be counted on to be methodical in his standup and opportunistic in his wrestling, while Diaz will likely use his unorthodox attacking style to try to catch the champ off guard. But don’t be surprised if there’s a little extra aggression in St-Pierre’s attacks. As classy as he is outside the cage, he is deadly once he steps in it. “We’re both going to hit each other as hard as we can and try to knock each other out,” he says. That’s music to the ears of Canadian fans, who’ve been longing to see their hero finish an opponent for the first time in more than four years.