Jiu-jitsu star and UFC fighter Mackenzie Dern is still on good terms with most of the people at her old gym, Black House, but she’s now training under Jason Parillo ahead of her next fight. Still, despite the amicable departure from her former team, she says that not everyone was so happy to see her and her husband, Wesley Santos, when they stopped into Black House to have a chat about business.
In an interview with MMA Fighting, Dern says that her former striking coach Juan Gomez asked the couple to come into the gym. “I think he was unhappy with a bonus, like money-wise, for my last fight,” she said. After stopping in the gym, though, things apparently got ugly between Santos and Gomez.
“We went to the academy and [Gomez] just swept dirt onto my husband, pushed him, and my husband pushed him back and they just went into a fistfight. It wasn’t like a brawl, a crazy brawl, it was like a street fight or technical fistfight. Back and forth — my husband’s doing feints, and I’m like, ‘Where’s he learning all this?’ It was so crazy,” said Dern.
Thankfully, there was no mention of anyone being seriously injured in the brawl, and Dern says that the other people in the gym (including her own father, Wellington “Megaton” Dias, who was giving Santos some fighting tips) were cheering on the “competitors.” Still, the altercation was enough for Dern to make her choice about where she wanted to continue training.
“I love Black House and everything they’ve done for me, but that coach, I can’t work with that. No matter how much… I don’t know, if you’re mad about it because your bonus wasn’t high enough, you just can’t attack someone. Especially when my husband is so humble with water and he’s like, ‘Can we have that talk that you asked me to do?’ I don’t know what happened. To this day, we still don’t know exactly what pushed it to that level.”
You can watch the interview below:
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