UFC veteran Al Iaquinta hasn’t been seen in the octagon since defeating Jorge Masvidal by split decision at UFC Fight Night 63 in April 2015.
Iaquinta since hinted at a potential retirement, but now things may have changed.
“I don’t even know if it’s that I was fighting for what I believe in,” Iaquinta said to Submission Radio. “I just kind of… I’m thinking for right now, I was hurting, my body was hurting a lot, I was not getting paid a lot, I got hurt. I felt like I was kind of hung out dry for a little bit. So I took a little break and see, you know, maybe the Real Estate thing is what I wanna do, maybe it’s not. It’s just… it’s tough. It’s not like I took a stand. And a lot of people made it that and I guess maybe I was kind of doing it, but I just really didn’t feel like fighting in New York in November for what the conditions were, for the guy that I was fighting, for the amount of money I was fighting for, the amount of money that that event was bringing in just didn’t feel right to me. It didn’t make sense to me to fight for what I was gonna fight for. So I asked them if we could talk about renegotiating something and I basically got cursed out. So yeah, I just went on, did my own thing and that’s it. They’re running a business, I’m running a business. That’s all it is. I gotta look out for my health though. That’s the first thing. When I’m going to a training camp and I’m flying people in and I can’t sleep good at night because my neck’s hurting. You know, I had two knee surgeries and then I take a year off and I’m asking them, ‘can I do appearances? Anything I can do? I realize I can only get paid when I fight. I realize I only get sponsorships when I fight, but is there anything I can do when I’m out?’. And they were really just like, ‘when you’re ready to fight, let us know’. So I don’t know. We’ll see. Hopefully I get back in there soon. I’m still in shape, I’m still hungry, still ready to go if there’s a right fight that makes sense. I don’t know. I haven’t really talked to anybody. I’ll talk to my manager when we go out to Denver and we’ll kind of sit down and see where we’re at.”
Then both Thiago Alves and Al Iaquinta posted the following on Twitter:
April 8? @ALIAQUINTA @seanshelby #Vamos
— Thiago Alves. (@ThiagoAlvesATT) January 28, 2017
@170 it's on @ThiagoAlvesATT https://t.co/GvFZoZyATO
— Al Iaquinta (@ALIAQUINTA) January 28, 2017
It's not known if Iaquinta exited the USADA testing pool. If so, he'd have to wait four months before fighting again.
