UFC 272: After years of buildup, Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal finally face off

By Case Keefer (contact)

Thursday, March 3, 2022 | 2 a.m.

When Colby Covington closed in on his first UFC title shot with a fourth consecutive win five years ago, the first person he embraced in his corner was fellow welterweight fighter Jorge Masvidal.

“Us two against the world,” Covington yelled into the cameras with his arm around the shoulders of Masvidal, whom he then called his “best friend.”

The shoutout was nothing out of the ordinary—the two American Top Team training partners had hyped each other up at every opportunity for years—but it would prove to be one of the final times. The pair had a massive falling-out shortly afterwards, one that went public two years later when they began exchanging words through the media.

The tension, which has simmered ever since, will finally come to a boil March 5 at T-Mobile Arena, when the two men meet in the main event of UFC 272.

The teammate-turned-opponent trope is well-worn in mixed martial arts, but few instances have reached the heights of Covington vs. Masvidal. That’s due not only to their level of hostility, but also to both fighters’ statures within the sport.

The only reason their fight has taken this long to book—more than three years after the start of their feud—is that each has twice unsuccessfully challenged welterweight champion Kamaru Usman since December 2019.

Covington and Masvidal emerged as two of UFC’s biggest draws at about the same time in the late 2010s. Covington ascended to become perhaps the most polarizing fighter on the UFC roster because of his distasteful trash talk and his embrace of former President Donald Trump, with whom he visited at the White House and spoke on the phone following victories.

Meanwhile, after years as a fan favorite, Masvidal suddenly arrived as a mainstream sensation when he notched the fastest knockout in UFC history—a five-second flying knee on previously undefeated Ben Askren in June 2019.

Covington wasn’t in Masvidal’s corner for that victory, though in hindsight, the former might have been referenced in the latter’s post-fight speech that included him saying, “I’m not the best at cutting promos or the [Instagram] sh*t, but I can fight.” Word of the two’s broken bond began to spread after that.

“A lot of people said what I did to Ben [Askren] was a little uncalled for,” Masvidal said in a news conference in the months after the Askren win. “No, it wasn’t. What I’m going to do to Colby is going to be uncalled for, and I can put my life on that.”

The 37-year-old Masvidal, in his words, “recruited” the 34-year-old Covington to American Top Team’s world-class training facility in Coconut Creek, Florida, after Covington completed a decorated collegiate wrestling career at Oregon State University. Masvidal allowed Covington to live in his house for a year around 2011, while Covington got his pro career off the ground.

Masvidal said he noticed a change in Covington once he got into the UFC and began climbing the ranks, when, Masvidal said, Covington became more interested in “Facebook likes” than loyalty and teamwork. Masvidal said the final straw occurred around the time Covington became the interim welterweight champion in June 2018, when, Masvidal said, Covington failed to pay a pair of coaches after a training camp.

Covington has disputed that account and said Masvidal turned on him as soon as he began experiencing his own success. “As soon as I won the interim title, that’s when Jorge got jealous,” Covington says in a video the UFC is using to promote their fight. “I made that gym. I came in and made every fighter better in that gym. That gym didn’t do nothing for me.”

American Top Team initially tried to accommodate both Masvidal and Covington by staggering their training times and separating them in different parts of the gym. But when the situation had become clearly untenable and required extra security, Covington was kicked out. He moved south to MMA Masters in Hialeah, Florida, where he has trained for his past two fights.

With the two still living in the same area, Masvidal said, he has tried to scope out Covington to settle their differences. He eats at restaurants they used to frequent, but Covington never shows, leading Masvidal to accuse him of “only doing Uber Eats” to avoid him. The two fighters have been present together at UFC events, but Masvidal has said Covington acts cowardly by avoiding him behind a security detail. 

It’s extremely rare for a non-title fight to headline a UFC pay-per-view event, but Covington vs. Masvidal is anticipated enough that it wouldn’t make sense anywhere else on a card. Both welterweights have reached the superstar-prizefighting peak for which they aimed in their days together; it just came at the cost of their friendship.

Masvidal’s first fight against Usman, at UFC 251 in July 2020, sold a reported 1.3 million pay-per-views, the best-selling non-Conor McGregor event of all-time, according to Tapology.com’s fight database. Both Masvidal and Covington’s final fight against Usman also did big business, tallying approximately 700,000 buys.

The long-awaited settling of their differences in the octagon shouldn’t result in much of a drop-off.

“It’s just such a personal rivalry,” Covington said in a news conference late last year. “He’s said so many things about me in the media. … I just want to hold people accountable for the way they run their mouth in the media.”

This story appeared in Las Vegas Weekly.