Sean O'Malley has admitted that he sometimes had to force his feud with Merab Dvalishvili before their first meeting.
On the way to UFC 306 in September, O'Malley and Dvalishili seemed to have a bitter rivalry. Their issues date out when the American dethroned the teammate Aljamain Sterling from his rival more than a year earlier.
But O'Malley now says that he never really had a problem with the current champion and that it was not a legitimate feud. The couple is set to rematch on UFC 316 and goes in this fight with a different type of build after drawing up a kind of friendship.
Sean O'Malley admits that Merab Dvalishvili was forced prior to the first fight
The run -up to the first fight by Sean O'Malley and Merab Dvalishvili was the furthest of friendly fans who could imagine. There were incidents between the fans of the couple before the Georgian eventually won a comfortable decision in the only combat event ever at Sphere in Las Vegas.
But O'Malley claims that they were never really enemies, who told Ariel Helwani during the episode last night of his show: “I feel like the first Merab fight that I did not want to like, because as a fan I do not necessarily enjoy each other as two hunters and there are beef there, I enjoy that.
“So I felt that I wanted to make that and it was not very authentic because I like Merab. I met him a few times, he is a nice guy, it's nothing. He is on his way to do his own thing, so I don't know if that has influenced his performance or what, but I don't mind.”
Merab Dvalishvili and Sean O'Malley have developed new friendship before UFC 316
In the aftermath of the fight, the couple came across each other at the UFC Performance Institute, where they enjoyed a recovery session together before their rematch was confirmed. And the champion has even made a joke that he wants O'Malley to 'go back' to his old trash can to build the fight.
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“I will be grateful for Merab forever in the sense that he hit me, he made me a better not only hunter, a better person, a better person,” O'Malley explained during a recent episode of his podcast. “Loss is a strange thing. Where there is struggle, there is an opportunity for growth.”
This seemed to annoy the champion, who took jokes to X to respond to the compliments from the famous trash O'Malley. He wants him back to his old manners and says to the American: “Cut it out of mfckkrs – go back to talk s – I have to be angry with you again.”