Urijah Faber gives his side of the story as to why Sage Northcutt didn’t fight at ONE 165: “There’s a lot of miscommunication”

Urijah Faber has opened up on why Sage Northcutt didn’t fight at ONE 165 last weekend.

Northcutt was booked to face MMA legend Shinya Aoki on the card in a highly-anticipated matchup. However, the night before the fight, two of Northcutt’s cornermen couldn’t get visas and weren’t allowed to be in his corner, so he opted not to fight without his core team being with him.

One of the cornermen who was in Japan and was able to corner him was Urijah Faber who says the entire thing was a miscommunication.

“There’s a lot of misinterpretation there, I think if you watch Chatri’s interview he kind of said the way it was. There was a last-minute hiccup in the visas of Fabio Prado and Mr. Mark Northcutt, Sage’s dad,” Faber said to James Lynch of MiddleEasy. “So, at 10:30 at night in Japan, we learned that they were not gonna be able to be in the corner. I got a message around 11:30 from Mark that Sage was not gonna fight, and I talked to him face-to-face and kinda got the lowdown on what was going on. There was a lot of miscommunication and things like that. I was cleared to corner, I was cleared to be in the corner if Sage did wanna fight.

“I didn’t actually get to talk to Sage face-to-face until about one o’clock in the afternoon on fight day, and the general consensus was that he did not feel comfortable fighting with a couple of different things that had happened,” Faber continued. “He is a very big man of faith, he has a relationship with God, and the holy spirit and felt like things weren’t adding up for me and he didn’t feel like fighting. I said ‘Are you sure?’ There are a lot more details on the nuts and bolts of the conversations that (were) had leading up to that happening, and they felt like they were misled and expected to go in there last minute. When they said he wasn’t going to fight, I booked a flight home.”

After Sage Northcutt didn’t get the fight at ONE 165, it’s uncertain when he will return to the ring, or if it will be against Aoki, as previously scheduled.

Northcutt is coming off a 39-second submission win over Ahmed Mujtaba at One Fight Night 10 in May of last year in his first fight in over after being knocked out by Cosmo Alexandre in his ONE Championship debut.