THE CANADIAN PRESS
MONTREAL — UFC welterweight champion Matt (The Terror) Serra was appropriately dressed in black Wednesday as he met the media ahead of Saturday’s UFC 83 title showdown with local favourite Georges St. Pierre at the Bell Centre.
The stocky mixed martial arts fighter from Long Island, N.Y., may have misjudged the Canadian audience with a sponsor-laden T-shirt that prominently featured GunsAmerica.com (a company whose online slogan proudly states "Connecting gun buyers to gun sellers since 1997").
Told that Canadians were not so big on guns, a laughing Serra responded: "That’s OK. I’m not from here."
That much is evident from the 170-pound champion’s reference to St. Pierre as "Frenchy" last May as the two waged a war of words stemming from Serra’s upset win over the Canadian to claim the title at UFC 69 in April. The slur has resurfaced in the buildup to their rematch.
"I think it’s just bad, I think it’s a mistake," St. Pierre, who also attended Wednesday’s workouts at a downtown hotel, said when asked about the Frenchy reference. "By saying that, he doesn’t just insult me, he insults all the francophone population. It’s very bad here, to say that to Quebec people. It’s very bad, he probably doesn’t know how bad it is for him.
"I don’t mind. He tried probably to get into my head. I never answered back to him. I will do my talking Saturday night — with my fists."
Serra will no doubt learn the locals’ take on his sense of humour Saturday in the UFC’s debut on Canadian soil. He insisted again Wednesday that he was just poking fun at a rival, who had started trash-talking first.
"I think mentally Georges has to make me kind of the bad guy, to put his head where it needs to be and that’s fine," he said. "Dude, I could care less if he’s French, Greek, Irish, I don’t really give a rat’s ass. I really don’t. And I think he knows that."
Still Serra (16-4) has joked that he has instructed trainer Ray Longo to "keep the engine running" Saturday night.
In truth, the UFC itself revived the "Frenchy" debate by asking St. Pierre about it in a televised pre-fight interview used to market the fight. St. Pierre’s answer — that Serra had crossed the line — has been featured prominently.
St. Pierre (15-2) was humble after losing his title, saying Serra deserved the win. But he angered Serra in a subsequent interview when he blamed the loss on the fact that a knee injury restricted his training to just two weeks.
St. Pierre told a Toronto radio station he would never have taken the fight if his opponent had been former champion Matt Hughes. "But I told myself it’s Matt Serra, I can beat this guy easily, he said. "I took it, I made a mistake, I learned a big life lesson from it."
Serra was not impressed. "How do I not get insulted by that," he told MMAWeekly Radio.
"Drink your red wine, go to your hockey game and shut up," added Serra, referring to St. Pierre as Frenchy and throwing an F-bomb in for good measure.
Serra later said he was taking a page out of the NASCAR-themed comedy "Talladega Nights," which pits Will Ferrell against a flamboyant Frenchman played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
"If anybody knows me, they know I’m a jokester," Serra said recently.
"Lighten up, dude, relax. If you called me a little Joe Peschi, told me to eat a meatball hero, I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep, all right? Relax dude, everybody just please lighten up." .
St. Pierre also had to deal with some unflattering comments about Canada from Hughes in the buildup to UFC 65 in November 2006.
"If Matt thinks there is no warrior in Canada, he’s going to be in a war Saturday night, I can tell you that right now," St. Pierre said at the time.
And in a hint of things to come, he added: "When you talk too much, if you lose, you look stupid."
