Chris Weidman to the Garden with extra UFC 309 motivation

Chris Weidman had to admit it: He didn’t love being bumped from the UFC 309 pay-per-view main card.

“I was on pay-per-view up until a week ago and then they took me off. I was honestly mad at first,” Weidman confided to The Post at Wednesday’s media day ahead of Saturday’s event at Madison Square Garden. I can’t do anything about it, of course. They do what they want.”

Instead of striking a bitter tone, Long Island native Weidman, who reigned as UFC middleweight champion from 2013-15 and headlined three pay-per-view events in that span, seemed to understand what he suggested may have been the logic behind the change. marking part of the event.

“If I go out there and get a great win, what does that do for them?” stated Weidman, who did terribly after a nasty broken leg in 2021 but also turned 40 in June. “I only have a certain amount of time left when they could put a young guy on there, a potential star for them, and then make money off of it.”

Whatever the case, Weidman’s mindset has changed even as of the summer of 2023, when he returned to competition after more than two years away to rehabilitate the injury he sustained when he threw a leg kick at Uriah Hall — almost identical to the way Weidman checked an Anderson Silva kick that broke the legendary Brazilian’s leg 11 years ago.

At the time, Weidman (16-7, 10 finishes) shared with The Post that he still harbored hopes for a championship nearly a decade after losing the title.

It is no longer the main driving force when it comes to his athletic career.

“I would love to get back to the championship game, but it’s more, I’m taking it one fight at a time now,” said Weidman, a Baldwin native who moved to South Carolina since the COVID-19 pandemic. “I just want to see if I can perform under the lights and do what I love to do in the gym and see how the body holds up and see where a great win takes me. But if I’m no longer able to to perform the way I want to perform, then I will probably be done.”

Saturday “probably won’t” be his swan song, though he noted he’s “not thinking about it” entering his matchup against veteran Eryk Anders (16-8, 10 shutouts), a former starting linebacker for the 2009 BCS national champion, Alabama.

Getting a win would be extra sweet for Weidman given the venue.

The native New Yorker was a major presence during the UFC’s lobbying effort to bring professional MMA back to the Empire State in 2016, but he is 0-2 competing at the Garden.

“Both of them meant a lot to me to win,” Weidman recalls with a wry laugh. “I won both fights going into the third round, got hit with a monster shot and that was it; my night was over. It was terrible. But I just see (Saturday) as an opportunity for either can run from it and be afraid of it or take it on and use it as motivation to get one’s redemption, so that’s where I am.”