Melvin Guillard was removed from tomorrow’s WSOF 20 fight card early this week by the promotion after the lightweight fighter failed to submit medicals for the fight.
Prior to the promotions decision to remove the veteran fighter from the card, Guillard sounded off on the situation with Submission Radio.
Guillard did not have anything nice to say about the promotion in that interview and on Wednesday, WSOF President Ray Sefo address the situation during a media conference call.
“Like I told his managers, from day one, his first fight with the WSOF, he missed weight and he came up with some sort of excuse,” Sefo said. “Listen, I’m the guy that fights for the fighters all the time, but when a fighter’s unprofessional and doesn’t live up to the obligations of his contract, I want to be the first one to step up and say something.
“He missed weight for his first fight. He missed weight for a world title fight. He put us at risk in terms of because, what happens if he’d won that fight? And then our PR team has reached out to him and his management team to do PR. He just completely ignored that, and then he goes off and does his own interview with somebody else and trash talks the company. It’s just, you know, I’m not going to tolerate that kind of behavior.”
“He was given a deadline, which was going to be last Friday for his medicals, and that didn’t happen. Then Ali [Abdel-Aziz] sent out an email saying that if he doesn’t have his medicals by 10 o’clock Monday morning, then he was going to be pulled from the card. At 10 or 11 — 11:30 or 12, we still hadn’t heard anything from his management team, nor had we heard anything from him, so I sent out an email stating all of the things I just said. And that left me no choice but to pull him from the card.
“Funny enough, five or ten minutes later, we get a phone call from his team, but we don’t hear from Melvin. So, you know, it’s just one of these things. If you want to be a professional fighter, then be professional. You’re getting paid good money to fight and we signed you to a good contract. It’s just unprofessional. I’ve been in this game a long time. I’ve had 101 fights and there’s not one time that I was not professional about any fight, even when I was an amateur. Again, I’m not going to tolerate anybody who’s not going to be professional, when we are trying everything that we can to try to help you.”
With Guillard being pulled from this event, his future with the promotion is unknown. Sefo and the WSOF management team will discuss the status of Guillard next week when they get back to Las Vegas following tomorrow’s fight card.