UFC lightweight Michael Chandler didn’t get the Conor McGregor fight he wanted, but his consolation prize certainly trumps a year’s supply of Turtle Wax.
“Iron” has been added to the UFC White House card on June 14, with Brazilian bruiser Mauricio Ruffy serving as his “Freedom 250” opponent. That’s assuming the promotion can get everything figured out over the next three months.
Doesn’t sound like they’re off to the best start.
“It’s absolutely massive and historic and to be quite frank with you, I was
just with some of the UFC brass yesterday,” Chandler told Fox & Friends. “They’re still trying to figure things out. Obviously, when you think about throwing a one-of-one new type of event, which the UFC loves to do, a type of fight that has never happened before and will never happen again, now you couple it with the extra layers of the added security of actually fighting on the White House lawn. The logistics are going to be a lot. And I think there’s going to be kind of a living, breathing, trying to figure out how this event is going to be laid out over the next 13 weeks between now and June 14th. So, it’s still kind of up in the air. All I know is I’ve got to train.”
Some UFC White House fighters don’t even have signed contracts.
“They said, hey, do you want to fight at the White House?” Chandler continued. “Would you rather, you know, kind of continue to chance? And I say, hey, I’m going to go ahead and fight at the White House. This is more of a short thing. And I get to be part of something historic. So here we go. June 14th. I think when this first was talked about, it’s like, hey, it sounds like a great idea. But are we going to be able to pull it off? But as far as the card goes, we’ve got the lightweight title in Justin Gaethje, another great American, who I was just with recently against Ilia Topuria. You’ve got Sean O’Malley on the card. You got myself on the card. If you have been to them, it is the greatest show on the planet.”
See the current UFC White House six-fight lineup here.
The 39 year-old Chandler has dropped three straight and five of his last six, getting finished in three of those five losses. As for Ruffy, 29, he improved to 13-2 by smoking Rafael Fiziev at UFC 325 back in January. The winner of this fight could be a frontrunner for McGregor during International Fight Week.
For more UFC White House news and notes click here.
