UFC President Dana White sat down with FUEL TV’s Ariel Helwani to discuss some of the most heated topics going on in the UFC at the moment. The majority of the conversation was geared towards the cancellation of UFC 151, in which White made it clear that he had, “No regrets whatsoever” in cancelling the card. He even agreed with Helwani at one point and said that Jon Jones and his team were not the only ones to blame for the situation occurring.
“Dan Henderson knew two weeks before the fight. Two weeks before he told me he was injured, he knew. And if he had given me those two weeks, like he should have, this fight might have happened.”
Jones said that he wouldn’t let Chael Sonnen talk his way into a title fight at the 205lbs division. Is this what almost happened?
“He was the only guy to accept the fight with Jon. He’s the only one willing to step up. It’s one thing if you’re trying to talk your way over a bunch of people because you talked, but the reality is he’s the only guy who’s ever come close to beating Anderson Silva. And he was the only guy to step up and take the fight with Jones. Not only did he accept the fight, he said ‘I’ll flight out to Las Vegas and fight him tonight.’ And Chael says some crazy stuff, but he meant it. The guy was going to show up with no training camp, with eight days and he was going to show up and train.”
White opened up about the downside of cancelling an event of this magnitude and he wasn’t pleased. Did they want to cancel the event? “No way in hell.”
“We spent two-million dollars in advertising for 151. It’s a business and I have to deal with it. Every day when I wake up, bad things are going to happen and I’ve got to deal with them. I’m proud to say this is the first time we’ve ever had to cancel an event. We’ve always been able to scramble and put it back together good enough to make the fans happy, or sometimes make the fight even better than before. You think we wanted to cancel the first event ever? No way in hell.”
