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<h3><a href="/go=news.detail&gid=457651" target="_blank">
Northcutt responds to Israeli kickboxer
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<a href="/go=news.detail&gid=457651" ><img class="photo" src="http://img.mixedmartialarts.com/method=get&rs=130&q=75&x=-2&y=0&w=700&h=372&ro=0&s=ilya-grad-sage-northcutt.png" /></a>
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<p><span style="line-height: 20.8px;">Earlier this month, Israeli Muay Thai champion Ilya Grad posted a <a href="http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/news/Former-sparring-partner-has-harsh-words-for-Northcutt-father-457462" target="_blank">blistering message on InstaGram</a>, and followed up in an interview with Luke Thomas. In sum, he was not impressed with UFC lightweight Sage Northcutt's controversial coach/father. The gist of the charge was that Northcutt's father is an utterly incompetent coach, and that Sage needs to get to a real camp.</span></p>
Sage appeared recently on Ariel Helwani's The MMA Hour, and offered a defense of his father, calling the remarks untrue and totally weird.
"That was my first time training with him, and he's supposed to be a Muay Thai world champion," said Northcutt, as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMA Fighting. "I'm not sure where he got his world title from. As you could see from the fight, I actually showed up there -- my jiu-jitsu coach, my grappling coach set it all up. So I was supposed to go there and spar hard, and he starts making excuses saying his neck hurts, he's this, he's that and he can't spar, so we said okay.
"So I'm out there just toying around, as you could see in the video, barely touching him, just moving around, playing, pretty having fun, as you could see. And the comments he said, the things he said out there, those weren't true. None of those were true, and you could see that from the video."
"For him to say that he was there to teach me, he wasn't there to teach me anything. From that video, you could see that he couldn't teach me anything. Like, he was just there to be a sparring partner.
"That was definitely not right of him to do that. I don't know what he's talking about. None of that, none of the facts or anything that he was trying to claim were true. So, I believe that he was just trying to get some limelight from us and get some attention and get his name out there."
"(That's) the first time that's happened. And like I said earlier, there's people who are always, they're trying to get attention. They might be saying negative stuff, but you know, I know what's true. The people around me know what's true."
Sage Northcutt fights Enrique Marin on July 9 at UFC 200. He does not appear to be preparing at a major camp.
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