Anik & Florian Podcast<\/a> that they did have negotiations with the promotion for that event.<\/p>\n\u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s true because there was a negotiation there also as well,\u201d Kawa said. \u201cIt just kind of didn\u2019t go anywhere after a while. Wednesday I got asked, \u2018Would you guys want to do this or that?\u2019 And we said, \u2018Absolutely.\u2019 They gave us a number. We said, \u2018Absolutely not.\u2019 And then we didn\u2019t hear anything after that. So, to me, there was no fight going on as of Wednesday afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey couldn\u2019t get there and then fell apart, so then they moved on to other stuff,\u201d he continued. \u201cNow, one thing I will say though is, I do believe when I got that call on Wednesday, they were talking to everybody. That\u2019s why when he says these guys weren\u2019t supposed to be on the card, I believe that. Because even the way it was said to me, \u2018Who do you want to fight? You guys can fight this guy, you guys can fight that guy,\u2019 the money that was offered was small in comparison to what we had already said we wanted to fight those guys from before. Whether it was White House card, International Fight Week or it\u2019s next week, it doesn\u2019t matter. It was more about getting the numbers. And when the numbers came, it was like, \u2018alright.\u2019 It was more like, \u2018if this fight could happen, here\u2019s the numbers that you guys down for.\u2019 And we\u2019re like, \u2018Not at those numbers.\u2019 So there was no fight..\u201d<\/p>\n
Kawa said he had talks with UFC chief business officer Hunter Campbell weeks ago asking if Topuria would be on the card, otherwise he would fly back to Spain. If an offer came later, he said, that would be \u201cway more costly\u201d to bring Topuria\u2019s camp back to the United States. That\u2019s what happened in the end, and it ultimately helped them in negotiations for a better deal with the UFC to make Topuria vs. Gaethje.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t have a deal in place, and then you\u2019re talking about you\u2019re going to announce something Saturday and the announcement is related to our negotiation,\u201d Kawa said. \u201cAbsolutely, I think we the advantage was [ours].\u201d<\/p>\n
Kawa said that rumors of a potential Islam Makhachev fight with Topuria being called off at the eleventh hour was inaccurate. According to Topuria\u2019s manager, they agreed to the idea of facing either Gaethje or Makhachev, but the welterweight champion is currently dealing with an injury.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had our choice and we said yes to Islam and we said yes to Gaethje,\u201d Kawa said. \u201cIt was just more about the numbers and the finances. When you talk about leverage, if somebody really needs something and you get pushed up against the wall at midnight, yeah, it\u2019s probably in your advantage because if at that point, if you\u2019re not doing the deal with Jon [Jones] and if Kayla [Harrison] can\u2019t fight and Amanda [Nunes] can\u2019t fight, and if Islam can\u2019t fight, and if Conor [McGregor] ain\u2019t fighting, then who else are you guys talking about? So I think that at that it obviously worked out to our favor, if that makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kawa had a cardiac ablation procedure on Thursday, and it caused a halt in conversations with the UFC, and he only got in touch with Campbell at 11:30pm Friday. The negotiations went on until 11:00am on Saturday, when \u201call the terms on that deal to fight Gaethje\u201d were finally agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of stuff that got discussed, a lot of different things, and that was kind of what happened in its totality,\u201d Kawa said. \u201cSo Dana\u2019s not lying, right? There was no Islam fight. We agreed to fighting Islam if that\u2019s what they wanted to do. But the terms and all that was not there. He said that none of these guys were supposed to be on the card.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ilia Topuria will headline the historic UFC event at the White House on June 14, unifying belts with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-529519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}