Michael “Venom” Page may not have been competing on home soil at UFC 304 but he was still in the headlines for a fight that could have happened.
Video footage captured after the event showed an altercation between Page and UFC bantamweight Farid Basharat at the fighter hotel.
Alexander Volkanovski also detailed the situation after being caught in the middle of it, where, despite his best attempts to keep Basharat from getting to “MVP,” he was unsuccessful.
The two men, at least from the video, tried to get at each other for some time until, with the help of security, they were separated and situation was deescalated.
Ahead of his return against Victor Hugo at UFC 308, Basharat gave his side of the story.
Farid Basharat Explains How He Nearly Came To Blows With Michael ‘Venom’ Page
In an interview with InsideFighting, Basharat explained exactly what happened at the fighter hotel following UFC 304 in Manchester.
He said that his relationship with Page goes way back to when he and his brother Javid were training at the same gym as “MVP,” London Shootfighters.
Having left that gym on less than ideal terms, they didn’t want anything to do with Page or the rest of the team. Although he had a brief interaction with the welterweight contender on the shuttle back to the hotel after the July event, Farid said there was no drama at first when Page started speaking to him.
“I shake his hand, I say ‘Okay, good.’ I keep it short because I don’t really want to, I don’t really like him, I don’t want to speak with him. Anyway, we get off the shuttle, we go back to, I just walk off and we’re in the hotel. I go through the lobby and he kind of tries to put his arm around my shoulder and I just kind of like brush it off and say like, ‘No, I don’t really want to speak with you, thank you.’ He was obviously drunk a little bit because I could smell it and his ego must have got a little dented.”
Basharat then said that despite his wishes for them to go their separate ways and leave it at that, Page continued to press him on what the issue was.
The 27-year-old added that things got heated from there, stating that getting into a fight at 7 AM in the morning with a fighter four weight classes above him wasn’t something that he was actively pursuing.
He claimed to have flipped was when Page threw a “cheap shot” at him while he was distracted by one of the Londoner’s friends.
What made him tip even further over the edge was that despite Basharat being the one who needed to get through members of security and a former UFC featherweight champion, it was Page who was backing up.
“In my head, I was so annoyed. I was thinking, ‘Just step to the left a little bit and we can make something happen. We could at least throw a couple of exchanges, a couple of shots,’ you know? But look, these situations, I’m not sitting here like some bad boy trying to create hostile situations, trying to get into fights, but sometimes when you have to go, you have to go. If someone starts on you, it doesn’t matter.
“It doesn’t matter who, why, where, when and at that point. I just lost it to be honest, and you’ll see in the video, I was trying to get ahold of him for probably about 10 minutes. The video cuts out short but honestly, I just kind of lost it because I couldn’t believe I was trying to deescalate a situation, I was trying to go my way and stuff and this coward…he’s the one that throws a punch. In my head, I was so p*****, I just wanted, at that point, I would have done anything to get my hands on him. But now, whatever, I don’t care about this guy. When I see him, we’ll deal with it however.”
