UFC President Dana White is looking to run UFC 249 next month, which was booted out of New York due to the coronavirus pandemic.
A lot of people have given White some grief for trying to run events during the pandemic, but UFC fighter Dominick Reyes says White is handling everything how it should be handled.
“Dana handled this whole thing exactly how you should handle it,” Reyes told UFC.com. “We are the toughest motherf—-ers in the world. Our sport is not like any other sport; you cannot compare it to anything else. Everything we do is different. The only thing we do that other sports do is put in hard work and entertain. We train our whole lives for these fights. For a lot of guys with fights that got postponed, I imagine it being heartbreaking. I applaud Dana and I applaud the fighters that are doing what they have to do to provide for their families and loved ones.”
The UFC did have to postpone three events due to the coronavirus and none of them have been rescheduled at this time.
Former UFC fighter Chael Sonnen is also coming to the defense of his former employer, saying White won’t win no matter what happens.
“You know, look, I—it seems that Dana can never win,” Sonnen said to MMA Fighting (via Zane Simon of Bloody Elbow). “I mean, nobody ever wants to give him any credit. All he’s trying to do is what he said he will do. He’s got everybody calling him quietly. People come out publicly and they want to challenge him, privately they want to call him and say, ‘Man, do I got a job? Do I have something to do? I’ve got a family, how do I plan my year?’ The only way he knows how to answer that question with a ‘yes’ is by doing business. That’s what he is, is a businessman. So he goes out and does what he’s supposed to do, that benefits all sorts of people that count on him—but they all do that private. Then publicly, they want to come out like they’re a bigger expert than he is. Man, nobody’s pretending to be an expert, they’re just pretending that they move life forward! What’s wrong with that message, how can that possibly be a bad message!”
White isn’t just working on getting UFC 249 done, as he has previously stated the UFC will return to a full schedule following that event.
