Dana White is holding firm on his decision to bar UFC fighters from competing in Zuffa Boxing.<\/p>\n
Last week, retired UFC fighter Dustin Poirier revealed that he\u2019d offered to box Nate Diaz under the promotion\u2019s sister-company Zuffa but got turned down.<\/a> That wasn\u2019t just about a dismissal of Poirier vs. Diaz. It was a promotion-wide decision from management that they wouldn\u2019t be mixing their martial arts. Not like that.<\/p>\n Asked at the UFC London post-fight press conference about that, White once again<\/a> shut down the idea and laid out his reasoning.<\/p>\n \u201cNo way in hell,\u201d he declared. \u201cThe crossover fights suck. No. That\u2019s not what we do. It\u2019s just not what we do. I want to see the best fighters in the world fight the best fighters in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s other networks and other people that do that s–t,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s not what I do. It\u2019s just not what I do. I did it once. I did it once. I don\u2019t know if it was amazing. It was financially unbelievable. But how many times can you keep fooling people with that?\u201d<\/p>\n That \u2018once\u2019 was Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather, which is the second biggest boxing match in pay-per-view history.<\/p>\n \u201cI run a business that every Saturday, basically, I put on fights, right? And we try to put on the best fights with the best fighters in the world. And you hope that the people that came to London, got hotel rooms, bought tickets, and spent all this money to come here, and the people who stayed home on a Saturday, got what they were hoping for. You hope you deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I hope to deliver on Saturdays is as many holy s\u2014t moments as possible,\u201d he concluded. \u201cAnd you don\u2019t get that from crossover fights.\u201d<\/p>\n White challenged the assembled press to name him a crossover fight that was worth the price of admission.<\/p>\n \u201cTell me a crossover fight that you ever saw that you were like, \u2018Wow, that was f–king unbelievable, and I feel like I just saw the best fight the best,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cSo, if I took my biggest star in the UFC versus a big star in boxing, and they fight each other and it\u2019s a lopsided, horrible fight that means nothing for either of them, what is the point and what\u2019s the purpose? It\u2019s just not what we do here.\u201d<\/p>\n White has a point about matching up major UFC stars with boxing stars, but entire promotions have been built off of big MMA names competing with each other under different rulesets. Poirier vs. Diaz under boxing rules would be great. But that\u2019s not what Zuffa Boxing is about, and we get it. Let Jake Paul\u2019s MVP put together the crossover and freakshow fights. UFC should be about the best fighting the best, even if they forget that sometimes<\/a> too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dana White is holding firm on his decision to bar UFC fighters from competing in Zuffa Boxing. Last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85,1396,114155],"class_list":["post-558980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news","tag-zuffa-boxing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558980","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=558980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}