Dana White was his usual brash, unfiltered self last night and after the press conference ended, he stuck around to chat with members of the media, including MMASucka.com. Here are some highlights:
Dana was uncommitted on whether or not Miguel Torres would ever fight in the UFC again after the Twitter scandal, saying only “We’ll see”. He did appreciate Torres’ statement after the fact, but left no confusion on how he feels about his decision:
“Nobody has any business making jokes about rape….It was from a TV show? Who gives a shit? This is not a TV show.”
When asked about consistency, given the similar circumstances of Forrest Griffin and Rashad Evans, White was defiant:
“You want to see consistency? Let’s see if anybody does that again. I double dare you. I double dare you to tweet something like that again. It’s unfortunate, [Torres] is a good guy. It made no sense, it came out of left field. Sending things like that out there on twitter, It’s not like you have some forum to explain yourself and discuss what you meant. It’s a hundred and something characters. It’s bad news. People can agree with me or disagree, I don’t care…it won’t happen again.”
Dana went on to discuss the place of Tito Ortiz in the company’s history and their tumultuous relationship.:
“Tito has a significant place in the history of this sport. When you really think about it, the battle between Tito and I and Chuck really did build this thing in the beginning. It was a big story. You had people who loved Tito and hated me. People who were on my side and didn’t like Tito.”
“There were times when me and Tito were at our absolute worst; when things were just nasty as nasty could be behind the scenes was when he fought Lyoto Machida. That was probably one of the craziest time in my entire career. Someday you guys will see it because most of it’s on video and most of it…are video blogs that never went out.”
“To explain to you guys how angry that guy used to make me, it was crazy. It was literally crazy.”
He also credited Joe Rogan for being there since the beginning, noting that Joe didn’t even get paid for his initial appearances:
“When I [first] called Joe Rogan and said ‘I think you would be great at commentary in the UFC’, he was on the highest rated show on network television at the time – Fear Factor. He did the first 15 UFC’s for free. We didn’t pay Joe Rogan a dime for the past 15 UFC’s.”
After attending UFC 140 I now see (other than the obvious fact) why Dana feels he needs to jump on Torres for his carless rape comments. I was really surprised in the ACC when only5-10% of fans were women. Ufc is trying to gather more instead of drive the few fans away. I agree with him now 100% as the only thing to top of a great night would be to have single ladies in droves. Torres will be back, and think about it. Forrest and Rashad were dealt with but more as ‘mistakes’ then Torres… Think if it was at your employer we’d all be canned as well. I love you Tito but I’m done loosing money on you.