“It’s kind of like poetic justice,” Geoff Neal said of the recent community turn on Ian Machado Garry in recent months.
UFC 296 was supposed to see the return of Ireland’s best and brightest rising star in the Welterweight division this past weekend (Dec. 16, 2023). Unfortunately, “The Future” Garry came down with pneumonia and was forced to withdraw from his planned clash against Vicente Luque.
Instead of rebooking the fight, UFC has gone ahead and remade an old pairing of Garry and Neal for UFC 299 on March 9, 2024. They were supposed to fight at UFC 292 in August 2023 until Neal was ultimately replaced with Neil Magny after falling ill, which led to a Garry unanimous decision win. This all came after Garry’s infamous creation of a t-shirt with a picture of Neal’s mugshot on it.
“I figured we would run it back after because I got sick and I couldn’t fight that last fight — well, just health issues — so I figured he would want to run it back,” Neal said on The MMA Hour. “But then he was talking s—t, ‘Well, I already beat him, so I don’t have to fight him.’ Weird s—t. I’m glad we got a chance to run it back now.
“It was difficult, especially after all the s—t he was talking and all the stuff going on. Pulling out of the fight, it just looks bad,” he concluded.
Neal, 33, hasn’t fought since a tough loss to the unbeaten 18-0 Shavkat Rakhmonov at UFC 285 in March 2023 (watch highlights). In the rebooked Garry match up, he’ll look to become loss No. 1 for another undefeated (13-0) opponent. As for fully reflecting on the t-shirt incident, it didn’t bother Neal too much, it just made for a little extra motivation.
“It wasn’t that bad, honestly, to me,” Neal said. “It was in poor taste. It was some low-class s—t. Before I [was scheduled to fight him], I accepted the fight and he messaged me on Instagram talking about, ‘Hey man, best of luck on the fight and thank you for accepting the fight,’ and all that, and then a week later he posts the mugshot tee of me. So it’s kind of weird, but you get what you get.
“It was just low class,” he added. “I’m not too bent out of shape about it. I’m just going to punch him in the face when I see him. We’ve got a date, and March 7, I’m going to beat him up.”
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
