Bellator featherweight champion Cris Cyborg has no ill will toward Cat Zingano after their Bellator 300 clash, but the feeling apparently isn’t mutual.
An emotional Zingano could be seen having a verbal altercation with Cyborg moments after being stopped in the first round of Saturday night’s co-headliner, and Cyborg later revealed what was said.
“Usually, I really don’t hate my opponents,” Cyborg explained at the post-fight press conference for Bellator 300, which took place at Pechanga Arena in San Diego. “I just said thank you to her for accepting the fight to fight each other. Then she said, ‘I don’t want to be your friend.’ She was saying something like I was a stalker, something like this.
“The reality is she started this. She started saying bad things about me, and then I don’t know the reason, she tried to make this personal, and I don’t have anything against Cat Zingano. I always promoted her the nice way. She’s the girl who beat Amanda Nunes, she was the girl who beat Miesha Tate, she’s a huge name in the sport. And I’m going to continue that. I’m not going to change what I think about her. It doesn’t matter what happened tonight.”
Zingano may disagree with Cyborg’s characterization of the buildup to the fight. In an interview on The MMA Hour, she detailed what she called bullying behavior from the champion after she signed with Bellator. At one point, someone purchased the URL for her full fight name and turned it into an advertisement for Cyborg’s accomplishments.
“I just thought it was weird, and like, what is that, like a sociopath? Why are you constantly thinking about me? Why are you constantly messing with me?” Zingano asked. “It’s weird, because I want to beat the s*** out of her the second I see her, which I don’t want to get in trouble. The other one is like, how cringey and creepy and stalker-y she is, it makes me think about a restraining order? What do you do about somebody like that?”
As Bellator 300 neared, Cyborg stayed away from trash talk, though she and Zingano shared several tense staredowns on fight week. When the fight commenced, however, it was all Cyborg; the champ pushed Zingano around in the clinch, shut down takedowns, and eventually landed a shot that led to a ground-and-pound TKO in the first round.
Zingano appeared visibly upset as Cyborg tried to console her in the cage. After the verbal altercation, Cyborg shrugged her shoulders and celebrated with her team in what was the fifth defense of her featherweight title.