Everything you need to know about the feud between Hector Lombard and Tyron Woodley
Hector Lombard recently took to social media to detail his long-running feud with Tyron Woodley after the two had a public altercation at BKFC's recent event.
Both Hector Lombard and Tyron Woodley were present at BKFC 19 in Tampa, Florida, where Rachael Ostovich avenged her 2019 loss to Paige VanZant with a unanimous decision win in the main event. The brewing bad blood between the two former American Top Team teammates came to a boiling point as Lombard and Woodley came face to face at the event.
Much of the interaction they had is inaudible in the videos that surfaced on the internet. However, Hector Lombard took matters into his own hands and went on Instagram to explain the situation.
Calling Tyron Woodley a "clown," Hector Lombard said that he wanted to slap 'The Chosen One' in the face but refrained from doing so out of respect for BKFC CEO David Feldman. The post went on to explain that Tyron Woodley was trying to get close to a woman from their gym whom Hector Lombard was dating, all the while being married with children.
Lombard stated that ATT's co-founder Ricardo Liborio requested him to leave the matter alone at the time so he did.
Read the full post and take a look at the altercation below.
However, Hector Lombard and Tyron Woodley's rivalry goes way beyond whatever happened between the two over this particular woman, whom Lombard refused to name in his post.
Tyron Woodley turned down a fight with Hector Lombard
Years ago, when both Tyron Woodley and Hector Lombard were welterweights in the UFC, Dana White explicitly said that he wanted to book a fight between the two.
'T-Wood' replaced Hector Lombard at UFC Fight Night 48 in August 2014 against Dong Hyun Kim and won the bout with an early TKO in the first round. Days after the fight, Tyron Woodley called out Matt Brown for a top-five showdown for his next outing.
However, Dana White was dismissive of the matchup and wanted to book Woodley against Lombard instead. He revealed in the weekly UFC.com exclusive The Download that Lombard had already accepted the fight and they were waiting for Woodley to do the same:
"What’s weird about that is that Woodley calls out Matt Brown, but he’s ranked higher than Matt Brown. But we want to do Tyron Woodley vs. Hector Lombard – that’s the fight we want to do. Hector said yes, we’re just waiting to hear from Woodley. Lombard said he would fight him, no problem," Dana White said.
However, the bout never came to fruition as Tyron Woodley did not accept the fight. Dana White shared with reporters in a media interview that the first excuse Tyron Woodley gave was that Hector Lombard was his teammate, making him reluctant to take the fight.
The UFC president then reached out to ATT founder Dan Lamber, one of the most respected entities in the MMA community. Lambert gave the matchup his blessing and confirmed Lombard's interest in it, but Woodley was not keen on it at all.
Dana White also revealed that he got a text message from Hector Lombard where he called Woodley a "two-faced phony" and wanted to "beat his a**". It was made clear to White that there was no love lost between Lombard and Woodley, which means the reason the latter gave for not taking the fight was nothing but an excuse:
"I'm literally flying here [to Sacramento], I'm on the plane, I'm wheels up, and I get a text from Hector Lombard that says, ‘Please get this Woodley fight done for me, I want this fight so bad, he's a two-faced phony and I want to beat his ass.' Literally what he said to me. So I called Woodley when I landed, and said, 'Obviously this isn't a teammate thing, here's what your teammate said, and he wants this fight bad.' And he said 'He [Lombard] can say whatever he wants, he's about him and he's always about him, this fight doesn't work for me and my brand.' He started telling me all these reasons why he doesn't want this fight. I said, whatever kid. Do your thing. But he wants nothing to do with Hector."
Hector Lombard spent the next many months on a crusade against Woodley, telling reporters how his ATT teammate was afraid to face him in the octagon. However, Woodley stuck with his reasons:
"The reasons why I didn't fight, I stayed true to those things. Me and somebody at American Top Team, whether this person is my best friend or whether this person is a complete idiot, I'm not going to fight that person unless it's for a world title because we can fight somebody else in the division. The division is stacked," Tyron Woodley said on The MMA Hour.
Woodley also revealed that he tried to reach out to Lombard on a personal level. But the latter refused to bury the hatchet for media attention, 'T-Wood' claimed:
"If Hector wants to sit down, if he wants to talk, I'm all good with that. But I know the truth, he knows the truth, and we'll squash it at some point," Woodley said.
However, based on Lombard's latest comments, it does not seem like he is willing to "squash it" anytime soon. Even before they nearly came to blows at Saturday's event, Hector Lombard made a post on Instagram urging David Feldman and BKFC to book a bare knuckle fight between the two where he could finally face his friend-turned-foe in action.