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Post by 1992 on Jul 2, 2010 4:08:15 GMT -5
"Nope. Now I don't have to hear about him anymore. I like it.... He has star power? Nobody cares. Do you realize this is something that's been created by the mixed martial arts media? Do you know how many people watched his fight the other night? 400,000 people watched it. The guy has absolutely no star power. They sold no tickets to that fight, either.... Here's the problem, the guy loses and gets to fight one of these guys? I've been saying for years this guy isn't all that. He's not great. Everybody's talking about how great this guy is, no he's not. Now he should deserve to come into the UFC and fight the best? No way!... The guys who fight in the UFC are fighting the very best three times a year. This guy hasn't fought anybody since 2005. The media created him and hyped him up. Not me. What do you want me to say? This is what I've been saying?"UFC President Dana White wasted no words as he gave his opinion on Fedor’s loss in an interview with ESPNRadio 1100. In a quote taken from CageWriter.com White expressed that he is putting Fedor Emelianenko behind him and “The Last Emperor” does not deserve to compete in the UFC. The “White vs. Fedor” debate has raged over the years with White coming off as bitter and scorned in his failed attempts to sign the MMA legend. It was an issue the UFC President could not escape as the media tossed the question upon him at every turn. Never one to shy away from voicing his opinion White took Fedor’s ranking to task as he attempted to shed light on what he felt was a media hype job and with Fedor’s loss, White is claiming validation on the matter. Now that Fabricio Werdum has defeated Emelianenko, White states that the quest for Fedor has now come to an end. Immediately after Fedor’s loss last Saturday White posted a solitary smiley face on his Twitter account and it appears that the UFC President has taken a bit of comfort in Emelianenko’s loss. One has to wonder that after so many years of this hanging over his head, will White truly be able to cut his ties to the situation or will the Fedor saga continue? www.bjpenn.com/profiles/blogs/dana-has-lost-all-interest-in
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Post by James Hetfield on Jul 2, 2010 4:45:23 GMT -5
Hah.
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Post by heartbreakking on Jul 2, 2010 6:59:25 GMT -5
<3 Dana
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Post by jfinnomore on Jul 2, 2010 8:23:11 GMT -5
here's his interview with MMAweekly on the subject
“I’m not interested,“ UFC president Dana White told MMAWeekly.com on Thursday.
“How many times have you seen us sign a guy when he just loses in another promotion? The guy just lost in Strikeforce, let’s sign him,” White added with a laugh.
Despite offering Emelianenko a lucrative deal before, White has never been sold on the former Pride titleholder’s top status in the heavyweight division.
“To be honest with you, without joking around, no (expletive). I honestly and truly have not believed that Fedor is this great heavyweight that everybody thinks he is. Yes, back in the day in 2005 and before that he was beating some great guys who were in their prime and was nasty. But to prove you’re the best in the world you have to fight the best consistently. You have to consistently fight the best,” said White.
“It would be like calling the Lakers the world champions that are playing some college team. You know what I mean? It’s not the same. I can’t believe... I know that everybody can see the sense in that, but people just love to, because he’s not here (in the UFC) they want to say, oh this guy could do this and that. It’s all mythology and (expletive).
“There’s only one way to find out who can beat who and that’s fight. And these guys aren’t willing to do it. So you don’t get the honor of being called the best fighter in the world when you won’t fight the best guys in the world,” added the UFC president.
White has not talked to Emelianenko’s handlers or M-1 Global following the loss to Werdum, and it didn’t sound like he has any intention to.
“I’m done playing the games,” stated White. “If we could have come to a deal with Fedor, yeah, we could have put on a big promotion and found out.
“It would have been a lot better if he had came over here and lost to Shane Carwin, Brock Lesnar, Cain Velasquez, than losing to Werdum.
“The media guys keep playing the whole Fedor thing. ‘Yeah, but it’s Fedor.’ I don’t care who it is. He’ a (expletive) man who hasn’t proved himself in five years in my opinion.”
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Post by thatyoungkokid on Jul 2, 2010 8:25:31 GMT -5
This was the best part of the above interview. There'd probably be a bigger crap storm if Fedor lost to Brock or Carwin than after the fight with Werdum.
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Post by Kliquid on Jul 2, 2010 10:24:03 GMT -5
LMFAO @ him offering Fedor the largest UFC contract ever, then claiming he "doesn't even deserve to fight in the UFC."
Dana White's opinions on anything outside of the UFC shouldn't even be taken into consideration. It's amazing how someone "in the know" could be so completely and utterly oblivious to the rest of the MMA world.
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Post by Mr. Orange on Jul 2, 2010 12:52:46 GMT -5
Nope, never saw this one coming. Here's a GREAT writeup that pretty much picks out holes in Dana's theory
It must be nice to have a memory as pleasantly selective as Dana White's. It's always there when he needs it, and it never fails to leave him feeling like the smartest guy in the room.
Take the recent upset loss that knocked Fedor Emelianenko from the top spot in the heavyweight division. To hear White tell it, he alone saw through the outsized fiction of Fedor, so it doesn't surprise him to see the Russian fall.
"I've been saying that forever, but the media overhyped this mythological creature that they thought was the number one pound-for-pound fighter in the world, which is just so...it's so asinine and ridiculous," he told MMA Fighting's Ariel Helwani in this video interview.
White went on to claim that he "never believed" in Fedor, which seems odd considering all the time and effort the UFC president spent trying to sign him to a UFC contract. It wasn't so long ago that he referred to his attempts to acquire Emelianenko as an "obsession."
That was apparently all a clever ruse, because now White would have us believe that he knew this Fedor guy was a phony all along. And how did he spot this paper tiger when the rest of us were duped? Simple: the lack of quality competition on Fedor's record.
"My thing with him was, the best fighters in the world are the guys that fight the best three times a year," White told Helwani. "Those are the guys that deserve your praise and deserve to be talked about. This guy won't even fight the best guys in the world one time a year. So to give him this praise...I'm telling you right now, 90% is because, oh, he's not in the UFC..."
This is White's go-to move when it comes time to talk Fedor. He insists that Fedor isn't deserving of our respect because he doesn't fight the best. Of course, if you asked White to tell you who the best are, it's a pretty good bet that you'd get a list of UFC fighters. That's how it works when you're a fight promoter: the guys you can profit from are the only guys who matter.
Of course, when those guys move on, as Andrei Arlovski did, exiting the UFC on a three-fight winning streak, then they become total nonentities.
Apparently it doesn't even matter that Arlovski added knockout victories over Ben Rothwell and Roy Nelson – the latter of whom is one win away from a UFC heavyweight title shot, according to White – before taking on Emelianenko. The mere fact that he was no longer a UFC fighter at the time seems to have made him worthless as an opponent by the time Emelianenko starched him in the first round.
It also doesn't seem to matter that Fedor was slated to take on Josh Barnett – then a top-five heavyweight – before Barnett's steroid debacle derailed the fight. Nor does it matter that not so long ago Emelianenko was aiming for a fight with Randy Couture – then the UFC heavyweight champ – before White and his team of lawyers put the kibosh on it.
Nope, all that matters is that Fedor won't fight the best. Though since the best are confined exclusively to the UFC, at least in White's mind, that's a little like criticizing Georges St. Pierre for fighting Dan Hardy instead of Jake Shields or Nick Diaz.
That's not to say that Emelianenko is beyond reproach. His record does feature such MMA punchlines as Hong Man Choi and Zuluzinho, with middleweight Matt Lindland sandwiched in there for good measure. And yes, his M-1 Global management team has at times seemed like a barrier between Fedor and the dream fights that fans want to see. There's no denying any of that.
At the same time, one surprising loss doesn't cancel out everything else he's accomplished in the sport. He beat Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic back when the Croatian (whose abilities White claims to respect now) was in his prime. He beat Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira twice. Doing so once, and against a declining version of the old "Minotauro," was enough to earn Cain Velasquez an impending title shot in the UFC.
And then there's Brock Lesnar and Shane Carwin, who have about half as many fights between the two of them as Emelianenko does in his storied career. Neither of them have faced the kind of steady diet of high-quality competition that Emelianenko did in his Pride days. At least not yet.
That's not a knock on them. They have, after all, faced the best available to them in the time available to them. But, with the possible exception of the Alistair Overeem bout, which still has yet to materialize, didn't Fedor do the same? Didn't he beat everyone he could possibly get in the ring with, and didn't he at least make an honest effort at getting in the ring with a few others?
The truth is that White is simply following the fight promoter's handbook when he disparages Fedor's claim to greatness. If Lesnar, in some alternate universe reality, were to abandon the UFC right now in favor of Strikeforce, White would immediately turn around and denigrate his accomplishments as a mere 4-1 novice who got half his wins against the likes of Heath Herring and Min Soo Kim.
That's how the game is played when you're in White's shoes. There's no harm in him playing it now, and certainly Fedor's recent loss makes it momentarily easier. But the rest of us would do well to take a step back and remember that there's a reason White has such strong opinions about Emelianenko to begin with, and it's not because he's a nobody who never really mattered to begin with.
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Post by Kliquid on Jul 2, 2010 14:30:33 GMT -5
That article is pretty much exactly what all of us have been saying for years now.
It's funny how White was saying "Fedor isn't a top heavyweight" when Arlovski & Sylvia were fighting for the UFC title, claiming that the "best guys in the world fight in the UFC." Then when Arlovski and Sylvia leave UFC and fight Fedor, suddenly they're both not even in the conversation for being top competition.
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Post by The Mac on Jul 2, 2010 14:38:58 GMT -5
haha good old Dana
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Post by K5 on Jul 2, 2010 19:36:39 GMT -5
yea, that article is summative and correct.
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Post by Patrick Bateman on Jul 3, 2010 0:53:35 GMT -5
yea, that article is summative and correct.  |
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Post by steel on Jul 4, 2010 8:39:43 GMT -5
LMFAO @ him offering Fedor the largest UFC contract ever, then claiming he "doesn't even deserve to fight in the UFC." Dana White's opinions on anything outside of the UFC shouldn't even be taken into consideration. It's amazing how someone "in the know" could be so completely and utterly oblivious to the rest of the MMA world. 100% agree. Dana can't take away Fedor's record, just because he couldn't sign him. Fedor finally lost...so what? Everyone is 3 seconds from a loss in MMA..it took Fedor years to get his loss. |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 4, 2010 17:37:06 GMT -5
Really sad to hear Dana say that about Fedor, but then again, it's what he's known for...
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