In a classic moment from “The Fighter and The Kid” podcast, former UFC heavyweight Brendan Schaub made an entertaining verbal slip-up The mishap occurred during a discussion about hazmat masks and sulfur dioxide, in the latest verbal gaffe from Schaub. This is the same guy who once called Jon Jones “Jon Africa,” and fans routinely speculate about whether his slurred delivery and constant mistakes are the result of CTE.
Chimaev is the current UFC middleweight champion and a high-profile athlete. Schaub somehow managed to mentally blend his name with hazmat suits, creating an absurd mixing of worlds between MMA and safety equipment.
These kinds of verbal fumbles have become part of the Schaub pattern because he’s almost universally disliked at this point. His personality has been exposed repeatedly, from blaming personal incompetence on a coworker with Down syndrome, to alleging his own son had epilepsy in order to sell CBD, to jumping on a JRE podcast appearance while his wife was having a miscarriage.
The episode featured Schaub recounting a recent hunting trip where he shot an axis deer, describing everything from the rifle setup to the final shot. He followed this with a long explanation about hunting prices and tags, but the more obvious subtext is that Schaub tends to adopt whatever hobby someone around him is into at the moment as a form of social ladder-climbing. Hunting is just the latest identity he’s tried on. He previously reinvented himself as a cyclist, and a car guy amongst other things.
Chimaev is one of the biggest names in the UFC today. Yet Schaub still managed to turn him into a linguistic disaster, reinforcing the same reputation he has built over the past decade: a guy who can’t follow a sentence without tripping over it.
