{"id":738105,"date":"2026-06-15T13:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/738105\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T13:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:08:12","slug":"white-ufc-freedom-250-delivered-did-monstrous-numbers-on-paramount","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/738105\/","title":{"rendered":"White: UFC Freedom 250 \u2018delivered,\u2019 did \u2018monstrous\u2019 numbers on Paramount+"},"content":{"rendered":"

The way things were looking coming into UFC Freedom 250<\/a> fight week, there were a thousand ways the event could go off the rails. Lawsuits, protests, lightning, bugs, and heat were just a few of the possible event-hampering factors that could mess up the fights on the White House lawn. But other than a precautionary rain delay pushing the fights back by 45 minutes, the event went off without a hitch.<\/p>\n

A tired but clearly pleased Dana White shared some of the positive feedback he was already getting, starting with his very happy broadcast partners at Paramount+.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just got off the phone with [Paramount CEO] David Ellison, he\u2019s going crazy,\u201d White said at the post-fight presser.<\/a> \u201cI mean, out of the gates from the first fight, the fights exceeded all their expectations. I\u2019ll let Paramount make their own announcement, but it was monstrous tonight. Yeah. Monstrous. Like, he\u2019s, you know \u2026 you don\u2019t get calls from billionaires flipping out too often. So he is extremely excited. I\u2019ll let them do their thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

White said that there were nearly 200,000 fans that passed through the Ellipse<\/a> park below the White House over the past two days, and merch sales for the event were through the roof. And of course there was the weather, which was looking like it might wreck the whole event.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI thought the weather was perfect last night,\u201d the UFC CEO said. \u201cThe weather was actually better tonight. We were sweating the storm all day. Beautiful all day, and then it\u2019s looking like from 6 to 9, there\u2019s gonna be a storm. And this is f–king crazy, but the storm literally split and went around the White House. And the breeze was perfect. I mean, just everything, you couldn\u2019t have had a better night. It was absolutely perfect. Just enough wind to keep the bugs off us. All the s–t that I was worried about played out perfectly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cProduction was off the charts. I mean, if you look at what we did, we built an arena on the White House lawn. That was amazing. But if you look at what we did at the Ellipse, it\u2019s almost more impressive than what we did on the South Lawn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though things went well, the potential for everything to go to hell made White even more anti-outdoors than he was before.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t ever wanna f–king be outside ever again,\u201d he declared. \u201cThere\u2019s just too much leading up to the fight. You just have to sweat. Unless you\u2019re in, like, Abu Dhabi when we did it before. I could be the weatherman in Abu Dhabi, and I\u2019d be right all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean the UFC won\u2019t continue to partner up with the U.S. government<\/a> for more events.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, the president and I are talking about doing a \u2018Fight for the Troops\u2019 next year,\u201d White revealed. \u201cWe did a lot of them in the past \u2026 So we\u2019re talking about doing it next year. He wanted to do it this year, and I said, \u2018Sir, I need a year to recover financially from the White House fight. So give me a year.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, White is happy to leave Washington, D.C. feeling like he delivered the event he wanted to deliver.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen: I love this country, and this event was for America\u2019s 250th birthday,\u201d White said. \u201cThere was no other political agenda for this event or anything like that. The fact that the President of the United States entrusted me to — they could have had anything. They could have put any kind of performance on. And like I said, there\u2019s tons of things going on in this city up until July 4th to celebrate. The fact that he trusted me to do this and to deliver tonight? And we did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI did all the media. We went to New York. I did far left, I did far right, I did down the middle. I did it all. And I believe that if you are an American, no matter where you sit politically, tonight was a proud night to just sit around and enjoy the 250th [birthday] of America. I was just honored to be the person that he trusted to deliver tonight. I hope everybody as an American feels that we did.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more UFC White House fight card news and coverage click HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The way things were looking coming into UFC Freedom 250 fight week, there were a thousand ways the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396,125620],"class_list":["post-738105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news","tag-ufc-white-house-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738105","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=738105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}