UFC CEO Dana White once again underscored that the promotion does not use fighters’ personal outside-the-cage fights and animosity to promote fights. That includes the history of Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov, which ultimately reached its peak at UFC 229.
In his recent appearance on Games With Names, the executive recalled the time when UFC 229 ended with controversy. To recall, the fight was headlined by a lightweight bout between McGregor and Nurmagomedov, with the latter winning the match via submission in 2018. However, even after the victory, “The Eagle” jumped to his opponent’s team, resulting in a melee.
“We were ready for what happened after, but we didn’t execute perfectly the way that we should have,” White shared. “Khabib got over the cage, jumped into his corner, and then all hell broke loose…
“We actually got it contained pretty quickly. We were expecting it, we expected it to happen, and if you look, the guys that were inside the Octagon, when Khabib jumps over, the guy is like just misses grabbing him.”
While this gave the event a bad name for some, it undeniably has made fans feel more excited when fighters develop personal grudges toward each other before their official fights. Some include the issues between Colby Covington and Leon Edwards and Bobby Green and Arman Tsarukyan. Unfortunately for UFC, its name is often automatically dragged into the talks with accusations that it is taking advantage of these instances to promote its event. White disagrees with that.
“We’re at a point now where we don’t need the craziness to build a fight, you know what I mean,” said White. “What we need are, just the matchup itself, the fact that these are two of the best in the world, and people think that I love that stuff, but I don’t because what happens is, we’re regulated by the government basically.”
As pointed out by the UFC boss in the past, the company has no control over the fighters outside the cage. And while he admitted that the promotion also tapped such topics in the past ahead of the fighters’ match, it didn’t mean that it was using it to boost the event’s prominence.
“The athletic commission is the government, and yeah, they don’t like that s***, so it’s bad when it happens, and you know, one of the things that I got criticized about by the media is when we promoted the fight, I promoted the whole thing that happened in Brooklyn with the bus,” White continued. “But it’s part of the story, I don’t give a s***, it’s part of the story. We told the story the way that it unfolded and played out.”
