UFC’s Dana White: ‘Everybody’s a F—ing Genius’

BOSTON—UFC President Dana White tells Breitbart Sports that “everybody’s a f—ing genius” when it comes to running your affairs by remote.

“The beginning of last season of football people were saying to get rid of Tom Brady,” the fight promoter explained to Breitbart Sports earlier this week. “Everybody’s a f—ing genius when it comes to your business and what’s going on. Tom Brady, the season that they were saying ‘he’s too old, he needs to go away,’ he won the Super Bowl. Right? And now the UFC is back and we’re putting on big fights again.”

The statement came in response to a Breitbart Sports question backstage at the Boston promotional event for UFC 189 on the difference between the UFC’s nightmare 2014 and its 2015 packed with dream cards.

Last year witnessed the cancellation of UFC 176, the complete absence of established draws Georges St. Pierre, Cain Velazquez, and Anderson Silva, and just one of the dozen numbered UFC pay-per-view events eclipse 500,000 buys. Three of the promotion’s first four cards of 2015 met that mark, with two title bouts occurring on both May’s UFC 187 (Jones-Johnson, Weidman-Belfort) and July’s UFC 189 (Aldo-McGregor, Lawler-MacDonald) and heavyweight champion Cain Velazquez returning in June against Fabricio Werdum in Mexico City. White also played up cable-TV cards featuring Frankie Edgar v. Urijah Faber and Luke Rockhold v. Lyoto Machida.

Breitbart Sports asked if the UFC made a conscious effort to stack subscription cards in 2015 as both an insurance policy against injury and an attempt to rebound against its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

“You’ve got to figure out how to control the things that seem uncontrollable,” he maintained.

White says there’s no reliable insurance policy to prevent injuries derailing cards and that the UFC seeks to reduce injuries that kill events through seminars educating fighters on training smarter. White also discussed the creation of a rehab facility at its new Las Vegas building that the promotion hopes will decrease layoffs for injured combatants.

The energetic promoter stuck around Boston’s Strand Theatre after the Jose Aldo-Conor McGregor presser to take pictures with fans and talk to journalists.

Reports of the death of the UFC or pay-per view, White opined in Mark Twain fashion, have been exaggerated. He reflected, “You’re going to go through these cycles sometimes where guys are going to have injuries and bad things are going to happen.”