Brian Ortega Claims Dana White Initially Refused To Compensate Him For UFC 226

The first meeting that Brian Ortega had with UFC President Dana White didn’t go as planned. The #1 contender for the UFC featherweight title recently met up with the UFC boss to see if he was going to get paid after a wacky UFC 226 fight week but his expectations were met with hesitation.

Ortega was originally slated to challenge Max Holloway for the featherweight title in the co-main event of this past weekend’s UFC 226 pay-per-view event at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.

However, Holloway had to pull out of the fight after he had been experiencing concussion-like symptoms and was taken to a hospital, which ultimately led to Ortega making the difficult decision to wait it out.

In a surprising move, Ortega revealed on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show that White has initially rejected his requests to receive a portion of his purse for showing up to fight at this event but also noted that he plans to meet with White a second time at a later date in order to see if they can work out an agreement that would have him paid for his efforts in training camp.

“We had our talk. We agreed to disagree pretty much, I told him if I was going to be compensated for anything, you know, if I would get anything. I told him I showed up, I did everything, my weight was good, did the open workouts, the media and he said, ‘No,’” explained Ortega (transcript courtesy of MMAMania).

“So that was that. I was pretty bummed out, heartbroken. After that, we had another meeting yesterday. We talked and he said he was just pissed off. He then said we’d talk again this week and figure things out. So right now, I don’t know what ‘figure things out’ means,” he added.

White may have been upset by the fact that the UFC attempted to get Jeremy Stephens to fill-in on short notice and fight Ortega but the top contender turned down the fight and decided to wait for Holloway to get healthy enough in order to make this fight happen.