UFC President Dana White refuses to work with two notable boxing promoters when he crosses over into boxing promotion in 2018.
Dana White has proven his ability as a combat sports promoter through the UFC. At least if the financial markets are anything to go by.
Convincing his childhood friend (and his brother) to shell out millions of dollars to invest in a then fledgling UFC organisation when it started out, to going over $44 million in the hole – to years later selling the business for a whopping $4 billion is perhaps one of the great sports franchise stories in history.
Now he’s looking at trying his hand at big time boxing promotion and at the moment is talking to boxing promoters and managers in a bid to put a stable together and start promoting pro boxing fights in 2018.
He’s taking the whole of December to figure it out but what we do know at this point is that Zuffa Boxing will fall under the same ownership as the current new owners of the UFC.
Speaking in a press conference lunch White was keen to impress upon people however that he won’t be working with two boxing promoters in particular:
“I’ll tell you this. At the beginning of this year everybody who’s anybody in the boxing business has been coming out here to meet me. The beginning of this year. Except for De La ‘Coo-Coo’ and Bob Arum.”
On whether he needs them, White said:
“Hell no. Hell no. I don’t need them. No. You can’t work with them. De La Hoya hates Arum and Arum hates De La Hoya. They are exactly alike. Both those guys are carbon copies of each other.”
He added:
“I have not even thought about that stuff. I’m not even looking at what they’re doing and thinking about what they’re doing. Listen I’m not s****** on these guys, maybe I am – but I’m not going out and looking at f****** what Todd DeBoef and Bob Arum are doing to try to emulate those guys. If anything they’re f****** copying s*** that we are trying to do.”
He also mentioned that he’ll look to stack the full card in his boxing shows:
“I’ll change everything. Deep. Like UFC cards.”
