Dana White Slams Huerta, Dines with Perfectly Sane Rampage Jackson
Dana White’s video blog is back, and it picks up steam around the 3:34 mark when he sits down to dinner with Rampage Jackson, who is totally “not crazy”. Just suffering from some “delirium”, as it turns out, but otherwise seems to be back to his old self. But don’t worry, the Dana White news update doesn’t stop there.
White appeared on a radio show recently (download the full version here, via Bloody Elbow) in which he has some sharp words for Roger Huerta. As you might have guessed, he is not pleased with Huerta’s comments bashing the organization’s treatment of him, and White responds by painting Huerta as an overhyped prima dona. And who overhyped him? The UFC, of course. But that doesn’t mean he should believe it, according to White:
“Roger Huerta’s a guy who’s been reading the headlines a little too much. You get out there and promote the guy and he’s like, “Look at all the papers I’m in, look at all the promotion I’m getting, I want a lot more money.’ Well he hasn’t fought anybody to get the money yet. He beats Kenny Florian, that’s a whole different ballgame.”
“Roger Huerta has contract problems? What’s his contract problem? He signed a contract, he’s under contract, when his contract is up he’ll renegotiate a new one. …What he was bitching about was doing PR. In his thing he said, ‘They got me out there doing PR.’ Yeah, moron. How do you think you make money? You don’t make money unless people know who you are and want to see you fight. Am I supposed to pay Roger Huerta to go out and do PR? Is that how it works?”
“That’s not how it works. When Oscar De La Hoya fights, he’s on Leno and Letterman. The night before his fight, he weighs in in Las Vegas, and then flies to Los Angeles to do PR for the fight. Because he makes more money. Because he becomes more popular and more people want to see him fight. …What happens is these guys turn into pussies, is what happens.”
Other highlights include Dana White guaranteeing that Affliction, Elite XC, and somehow even CBS, will all go out of business, just like the IFL. Also says Tito Ortiz was a “wallflower” during his time on “The Apprentice” because he didn’t want to be exposed as an idiot. And he dismisses the idea that he’ll eventually have to deal with a fighter’s union of some sort:
“It’ll never happen. You know why? Because publicly these guys say, ‘I want all us to make…’ but privately, they don’t care about everybody else. They care about ‘me’. I don’t care if you make more money. I need more money. That’s the way that the fight business is. Believe me, I’ve been in the fight business my whole life. I know fighters and the way they think, even the Randy Couture thing. Randy said, ‘I’m doing this for all the other fighters.’ Well you know Randy was pissed off because thought we were paying Fedor more money.”
