New Mexico Athletic Commissioner Comments On UFN 42 Controversies

UFC Fight Night 42 went down in Albuquerque, NM this past Saturday. The card its fair share of controversial issues to say the least. From an amazing decision in the Ross Pearson/Diego Sanchez fight, to a fighter pushing a referee, but wait there’s more. The New Mexico Athletic Commission’s Tom King spoke with SWFights.com about several of the issues that took place on Saturday night.

Pearson will be filing an appeal regarding the split decision loss to Diego Sanchez. Here’s what King had to say:

“Ross was very professional about the way he presented the appeal to us,” said King, who also understood why the decision could draw so much public interest. “[The decision] was controversial. A hometown fighter won a split-decision.”

“I’m not sure it’ll be wise to do it (at an already scheduled meeting at 4 PM on Tuesday). We will do our due diligence to review the matter and go from there. We will take our time investigating this.”

“Rest assured that it will not take us six weeks to come to a decision on the Sanchez-Pearson matter.”

“[The investigation] may very well last until next month,” said King. “There are a lot of hurdles. We’re probably going to look into getting a legal opinion.”

Will anything change as far as the decision? Probably not, but we will keep you posted.

Jason High lost to Rafael Dos Anjos on Saturday and when the referee stopped the fight High thought it would be a great idea to push the referee. It wasn’t. The UFC has since gave High the boot and it’s expected that he will face some kind of disciplinary action from the commission as well.

“That’s never happened in New Mexico before,” said King. “That just really doesn’t happen sport wide. Everyone knows you don’t touch officials. You just don’t.”

Now let’s get to some real conspiracy theory stuff. Pearson and his camp have been making statements about how none of the New Mexico based fighters were drug tested, specifically none of Greg Jackson’s fighters. Pearson’s manager spoke about it:

“Ross was drug tested before the fight, which is perfectly normal,” said Dean Amasinger, Ross Pearson’s manager. “That’s absolutely fine, and all this stuff is supposed to be random. But when Ross came back from the drug test, he said to me, ‘I’ve seen the list; none of the Jackson guys are on the drug test list, or the New Mexican guys who are fighting on the card.’ And so I went and checked and that was the case.”

King denied that claim and insisted that the information was untrue.

“We always, always test the two fighters involved in a main event,” said King. “That includes the fighter from Jackson’s [Rustam Khabilov] on Saturday. For someone to say that a fighter from that camp was not tested, is factually incorrect.”

“The names (of the eight fighters tested) will come out in a few days and everyone will see who was tested.”

As far as the now infamous fish-hook technique used by Bryan Caraway, King says that Eric Perez and his team have not filed any kind of complaint.

Finally, King ended with this thought.

“We learned a lot from this show,” said King. “We have rules and procedures in place and we’re going to apply them to assist us in addressing the issues that have presented themselves.”

By Ryan Miller | Twitter