WSOF president Ray Sefo rips Melvin Guillard's unprofessionalism

Melvin Guillard's lack of professionalism led World Series of Fighting to pull him from his bout this weekend according to Ray Sefo.

WSOF president Ray Sefo has been a fighter for many years, and understands that professionalism is important. Unfortunately for him, it didn't seem to be a big deal to one of the fighters that was scheduled to fight on his WSOF 20 card this weekend. First, Melvin Guillard went on a rant, saying that he'd rather be in the UFC. Then he didn't submit his medicals and generally just avoided contact with the promotion. So enough was enough, and they decided to pull him.

Sefo explained his reasoning on a recent conference call for the event (transcribed by MMA Fighting):

"Like I told his managers, from day one, his first fight with us he missed weight and he came up with some sort of excuse," Sefo said. "Listen, I'm the guy that fights for the fighters all the time, but when a fighter's unprofessional and doesn't live up to the obligations of his contract, I want to be the first one to step up and say something.

"[Guillard] missed weight for his first fight. He missed weight for a world title fight. He put us at risk in terms of...because, what happens if he'd won that fight? And then our PR team has reached out to him and his management team to do PR. He just completely ignored that, and then he goes off and does his own interview with somebody else and trash talks the company. It's just, you know, I'm not going to tolerate that kind of behavior."

...

"He was given a deadline, which was going to be last Friday for his medicals, and that didn't happen," Sefo said. "Then (Vice President/matchmaker) Ali (Abdel-Aziz) sent out an email saying that if he didn't have his medicals by 10 o'clock Monday morning, then he was going to be pulled from the card. At 10 or 11 -- 11:30 or 12 -- we still hadn't heard anything from his management team, nor had we heard anything from him, so we sent out an email stating all of the things I just said. And that left me no choice but to pull him from the card.

"Funny enough, five or ten minutes later, we get a phone call from his team, but we don't hear from Melvin. So, you know, it's just one of these things. If you want to be a professional fighter, then be professional. You're getting paid good money to fight, and we signed you to a contract. It's just unprofessional. I've been in this game a long time. I've had 101 fights and there's not one time that I was not professional about any fight, even when I was an amateur. Again, I'm not going to tolerate anybody who's not going to be professional, when we are trying everything that we can to help you."

Amazingly, despite all that the promotion might still give him another shot:

"Right now that's something we're going to discuss," he said. "Like I told his management team, that's something we're going to discuss next week when this is over. And then we'll see where we go from there."

Guillard has burned a lot of bridges over the course of his career, and this just seems like another one to add to the list.