PULLING NO PUNCH

B.J. Penn doesn’t have to worry about the wrath of a players’ union. As the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s interim lightweight champion, he is free of significant locker-room pressure to keep quiet and is established enough to speak freely without scolding from management.

The distinct void of outrage from active athletes about steroid use -- especially after baseball’s Mitchell Report -- ends with Penn. The 29-year-old fighter finds himself fighting for a championship Saturday in Las Vegas against Sean Sherk, who was stripped of the lightweight title last year after testing positive for the steroid nandrolone.

No muzzle here.

“You’re a coward if you take steroids,” said Penn. “People know how to beat these tests. They get doctors, they do things to hide. . . . That’s why this will be a historic night. If I can beat these people, I’ll show the kids you can train clean and win these fights.”

Penn also said he suspects Sherk is not the sole drug user in the 250-fighter UFC stable.

“It’s hard for me, a guy who’s never been using performance-enhancing drugs, who wakes up in the morning in pain from working out, to find out someone else is using. . . . ,” said Penn, who is also a former UFC welterweight champion. “I’m a purist, and I’m more a fighter than an athlete. To pervert what we do with growth hormone, EPO doping or steroids, it just gets to you.

“What happened in the Old West if you were caught cheating with a couple aces up your sleeve? You’d get shot.”

Sherk, 34, was stripped of his title in July after a California State Athletic Commission urine test found him positive for nandrolone, with a nanogram count of 12. That is roughly six times higher than the acceptable threshold.

“We stand by the results,” said William Douglas, the commission official who helped supervise the testing procedure.

Sherk appealed, hiring attorney Howard Jacobs, who defended Floyd Landis, the cyclist who was stripped of his Tour de France victory after testing positive for synthetic testosterone.

At the commission hearing on Sherk, Jacobs questioned the test’s chain of custody, and wondered if supplement contamination had occurred.

“I compete with a clear conscience and a clear head . . . I know what I did and what I didn’t do, and I went above and beyond to prove myself innocent,” Sherk said on the conference call with Penn. “The California commission knows I didn’t do anything, either.”

Although the commission reduced Sherk’s scheduled one-year suspension to six months, Douglas said, “For him to make these claims is incorrect.” The state commission, however, now relies on testing by a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab in Canada, and hasn’t reduced a drug suspension since Sherk’s.

While Sherk was banned, Penn won the lightweight interim title in January by defeating Joe Stevenson by second-round rear naked chokehold. He then announced to Sherk at ringside that he would “kill” the ousted champion when they fought.

When Penn heard Sherk profess innocence in their joint conference call, he jumped in:

“You just heard it: Sean Sherk has never done steroids. If he didn’t, I guess his levels will test the same again,” when he submits to Nevada Athletic Commission testing this week.

When someone asked about the pressure connected to the fight, Penn interrupted Sherk’s answer to ask him, “What about the pressure of not being on the juice this time? You feel that pressure?”

Penn’s scorn can be chalked up to pre-fight publicity, but its intensity trumped a similar exchange in hype-crazy boxing when Zab Judah’s camp requested extensive drug testing of Shane Mosley, who has been connected to the steroid-distributing Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.

Even outspoken UFC President Dana White wouldn’t pound Sherk, saying of his fighter, “I’ve never seen a change in his body, the kid’s always been a stand-up guy.”

In a later interview with The Times, Penn said he believes there is a wider performance-enhancing drug use problem in the UFC, an issue White said he addressed in a meeting with several top fighters last fall.

“If you set a record using steroids in baseball, you deserve an asterisk saying, ‘He did it using this,’ but that’s just about hitting balls over a fence,” Penn said.

“We’re out there as fighters trying to kill each other. What if someone gets seriously hurt, and then we find out the winner was on steroids? That’ll make our sport look bad. . . . Now that it’s my turn to stand across the ring from him, I need to talk about it.”

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lance.pugmire@latimes.com

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UFC 84

B.J. Penn vs. Sean Sherk

Saturday, coverage begins at 7 p.m., PPV