Dillon Danis is preparing hard for his Polaris bout with Garry Tonon and the ADCC. Following a non starter performance at Worlds Danis has opted to change up the camps a bit and has been training at Unity with the Miyao brothers.

Last April, Marcelo Garcia made the difficult decision to have his black belts Dillon Danis and Mansher Khera suspended from the academy due to their bad behaviour.

The newly signed Bellator MMA fighter Dillon Danis (0-0 in MMA) has come under much fire with his recent social media arrogant style.

Danis told Ariel Helwani of The MMA Hour about his side of the story:

It was a suspension, but I don’t feel like I’m coming back. I love Marcelo, to death. I would never say anything bad about him.

“He was my idol before I went to him, and then he ended up being my coach and a dad figure for me. He just needs to get his stuff straight, too.”
“What I wanted was someone that would have my back no matter what. Like, he would always be there for me, and it kind of hurt that he wasn’t.”

“We had a lot of differences (Marcelo and him). He really wants you to be like him…He wants you to be always smiling and do that stuff. But we can’t all be the same . You can’t make be that way. There’s a lot of fake people in Jiu-Jitsu but I’m not like that.

But we had a lot of differences, he really wants you to be like him, exactly like him. Always smiling and its understandable but at the end of the day if we all act the same nobody is different. He makes everyone on the team be like, yes men.”

That wasn’t the only time during the interview that Danis described his former coach as a father figure. In fact, that was part of the reason the suspension hurt him so much — he felt like a child whose father abandoned him.

This was not the first time he had been suspended:

We were supposed to get our black belts, and no one knows about this…Something happened in my life, and I took a picture of myself with the finger, and he [Marcelo] suspended me for six months.

About the video which Marcelo posted:

It (the video) hurt. I was so mad because the way he makes it sound, it’s like we killed someone.

I feel like he abandoned me a little bit. You can’t just do that. There’s a lot of riffs in the road and at the end of the day I wanted someone to have my back no matter what. It kind hurt to see that he didn’t. I was never disloyal to him. I never did anything bad to him. He just didn’t like me on social media.

You can watch the whole interview here: