Former Bellator fighter James Gallagher told his side of his story about his unique fight cancellation.
Gallagher was booked to fight UFC veteran Ali AlQaisi at ACA 194 last Thursday. It was a highly anticipated fight on the card. But AlQiaisi went into the cage and revealed that Gallagher left the arena because he wasn’t happy with his warm-up area.
Now, a week after the incident, Gallagher explained why he canceled the fight, and all the shady things ACA did all week.
“I go into the room and I go into this room where there are no mats, no nothing. And all the blue corners are in the room,” Gallagher said at the “Energetic show” (via MMA Junkie). “So you can’t swing a cat into it. Then I text the head (of ACA) and say, ‘Listen, I need mats.’ They then tell me that my fight that night has now been moved from 5pm to 9pm. I’m like, ‘Okay, honey, it is what it is. I’m here to fight, it’s all good. ”
Gallagher claims the promoter told him to go back to the hotel and come back in a few hours. When he got back, the warm-up room had to be cleaned up.
Once James Gallagher got back to the hotel, he said ACA then called him back and said his fight had been rescheduled again.
Gallagher then had to rush back to the arena, and to his surprise, the warm-up area had not improved.
James Gallagher claims he couldn’t warm up properly
“As I lay down to take a nap, they said, ‘The fighting has moved faster now,’ said James Gallagher. ‘You have to be back here in ten minutes now to wrap up your hands.’ So I’m sitting there with my stomach full, after they told me I wouldn’t be going any further for another four or five hours. ‘I’m making my way there. Go to the changing rooms, still no mats in them, with f*cking 50 people in this small room where you couldn’t walk around with nothing.
“Everyone’s wrapping their hands, there’s chairs around them, things like that. So we wrap hands and text them: Listen, is there a place for mats here? Or even just a place where I can move around? I wasn’t looking for flowers and chocolate there. You know what I mean? I was just looking for a place that was good to stretch out. To be mobilized, to warm up and get ready to fight.”
James Gallagher was still going to fight until someone high up in ACA started getting in his teammate’s face.
“So after that, the team decided to message my coach at home and they said, ‘Listen James, you’re not fighting. This isn’t happening. They’ve been messing with you all day, messing you up all day yesterday. And it just can’t happen like that.’ You are a professional fighter. You’ve already been around the block, and you don’t come here to catch a cold. And to go out there and fight one of their guys that has a room to warm up,” Gallagher concluded.
Gallagher is 13-3 as a pro and is coming off a submission win over Fabricio Soares.
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