Dana White has stated that he is not the reason Conor McGregor won’t be fighting at UFC 200.
The promotion’s president was speaking at yesterday’s UFC press conference in New York after Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier were confirmed as 200’s headline fight.
And it was only a matter of time before White was forced to confront the Irish elephant in the room…
As reported by MMA Fighting, White said:
I didn’t prevent Conor from fighting at UFC 200. I did not.
If you look at the press conference, Joanna Jedrzejczyk who flew in to the press conference from Poland, Claudia came in from Brazil, [Aldo] flew in from Brazil. People came in from all over the world, Frankie’s just getting home and hasn’t seen his family.
This is what we do. This is how it works. I didn’t prevent him from fighting in UFC 200. He knew what the deal was, I told him what the deal was, and he opted to do that…There were things that Conor needed I was willing to make sure that Conor would have the things that he needed when he landed in Las Vegas, when he came to New York, or wherever else we went.
It isn’t just ‘Hey, you have to do this!’ I will bend and I will do things to make it work for these guys, and Conor didn’t do it.
That’s the truth, the whole truth, and that is the way it is.
White added that he does expect to see the ‘Notorious’ back in the Octagon before too long.
He said:
Conor’s going to fight again. He’s going to fight at UFC 201, 202, 203, whatever the deal might be, we’ll see…what’s next, when that plays out. Listen, 200 is the fight everybody’s been looking forward to for a long time. It is what it is. The show’s going to roll on and Conor’s going to fight again.
So there we have it – McGregor didn’t want the press obligations, while Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones were only too happy to step in at the T-Mobile Arena on July 9.
