We still don’t know half of what went on with how the UFC White House card was booked, but the half we do know now is pretty wild.
Following the ‘big’ announcement at UFC 326, Justin Gaethje admitted he didn’t know he was on the card until hours before the reveal. The next day, UFC CEO Dana White admitted Justin Gaethje vs. Ilia Topuria wasn’t originally supposed to be on the card, and they’d even discussed Topuria vs. Islam Makhachev. That didn’t happen due to a Makhachev hand injury.
According to
Topuria’s manager Malki Kawa, the UFC got in touch four days before the announcement to probe the situation and then disappeared after he let them know how much it would cost to get “El Matador” in the cage.
“Wednesday I got asked, ‘Would you guys want to do this or that?'” Kawa told MMA Fighting. “And we said, ‘Absolutely.’ They gave us a number. We said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And then we didn’t hear anything after that. So, to me, there was no fight going on as of Wednesday afternoon. They couldn’t get there and it fell apart, so then they moved on to other stuff.”
“Now, one thing I will say though is, I do believe when I got that call on Wednesday, they were talking to everybody. That’s why when [Dana] says these guys weren’t supposed to be on the card, I believe that. Because even the way it was said to me, ‘Who do you want to fight? You guys can fight this guy, you guys can fight that guy,’ the money that was offered was small in comparison to what we had already said we wanted to fight those guys from before.
“Whether it was White House card, International Fight Week or it’s next week, it doesn’t matter,” Kawa continued. “It was more about getting the numbers. And when the numbers came, it was more like, ‘If this fight could happen, here’s the numbers that you guys down for.’ And we’re like, ‘Not at those numbers.’ So there was no fight.”
This sounds similar to what happened with Jon Jones: the UFC approached him and asked him if he was interested, and he said, ‘Yes, at this price.’ And according to Jones, the UFC ‘low-balled’ him. “Bones” is now asking the promotion to release him.
Things clearly worked out for Ilia Topuria, though. Not only is he on the card, he’s in the main event spot above the Alex Pereira vs. Ciryl Gane interim heavyweight title fight, despite being a lighter weightclass champion. That’s not how things normally work in the UFC, and points towards Ilia getting his way in negotiations.
While Topuria’s manager didn’t divulge too many details, he did imply the UFC’s rushed negotiations and need to announce the fights at UFC 326 was to his client’s advantage.
“If you don’t have a deal in place, and then you’re talking about you’re going to announce something Saturday and the announcement is related to our negotiation?” he said. “Absolutely, I think we the advantage was ours.”
