“D-Rod” had a wild few months.
Two months ago, No. 15-ranked Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Welterweight contender Daniel Rodriguez shocked mixed martial arts (MMA) fans when he revealed he had spent eight months incarcerated in a prison in Tijuana, Mexico — and now, he has given a little more insight into his time behind bars.
And yeah, it is pretty wild.
It all started when Rodriguez — who was celebrating in San Diego after defeating Kevin Holland at UFC 319 — wanted to go to Tijuana for the
weekend. But, while crossing the border, he was caught with 27 grams of marijuana in his backpack. And because bringing weed into Mexico is a serious federal crime, he was detained and thrown in jail.
While being locked up in a foreign country is obviously a nightmare — and Rodriguez was initially threatened with multiple years behind bars — it apparently wasn’t all bad because he eventually got an “upgrade” from a very powerful person.
“When I got there, one of the guards recognized me, and you know, I’m in handcuffs and shit — and he was like, ‘Yo, can I get a picture?’” Rodriguez told Joe Rogan on his podcast. “And I’m like, ‘What!?!?’ So the other inmates were looking around like, ‘Who is this guy?’ because the guard was trying to explain who I was and if I was famous. It was the worst jail, and I’ve been in a lot of jails.”
Rodriguez was eventually thrown into a small processing cell with several other inmates and kept there for 10 days, where he said he was covered in bug bites. According to “D-Rod,” a guard later tried to con him into paying $7,000 to move into a better cell. But before that happened, another inmate told the UFC fighter he would come back to get him out.
And that’s exactly what happened.
“The guards came and pulled me out and put me into a completely different section — the third floor in the second building,” Rodriguez said. “So I go up there, escorted by guards, and there is this curtain covering the tier, and I’m like, ‘What the f—k is going on?’ I get in there and they pull me to this dude, and he’s like, ‘Oh, you’re a UFC fighter?’ It turns out he’s the head of a cartel — a cartel leader. And he wanted to show me and tell me how they were running things. This dude had it made, TV in his cell with a PlayStation, all the amenities you can think of — and told me he runs it here and says, ‘This is our home.’”
The cartel leader ended up charging Rodriguez $3,000 to be his cellmate, but “D-Rod” also became his bodyguard for eight months while the cartel leader was looking at serious prison time for allegedly impersonating government officials.
“I got the feeling I was his protection. We would go to the yard, and he’d tell me to walk with him,” Rodriguez said. “I got the impression that because I was his cellmate, I got his back and he’s got mine. I really trusted him, and that’s a hard thing to do in jail, but you catch vibes off people real easy.”
Now, just two months after his release, Rodriguez finds himself in his first UFC main event, taking on hometown hero Uros Medic when the promotion makes its first trip to Serbia for UFC Belgrade — almost a full year after his nightmare began.
Safe to say, Rodriguez has had one hell of a year.
