The way things were looking coming into UFC Freedom 250 fight week, there were a thousand ways the event could go off the rails. Lawsuits, protests, lightning, bugs, and heat were just a few of the possible event-hampering factors that could mess up the fights on the White House lawn. But other than a precautionary rain delay pushing the fights back by 45 minutes, the event went off without a hitch.
A tired but clearly pleased Dana White shared some of the positive feedback he was already getting,
starting with his very happy broadcast partners at Paramount+.
“I just got off the phone with [Paramount CEO] David Ellison, he’s going crazy,” White said at the post-fight presser. “I mean, out of the gates from the first fight, the fights exceeded all their expectations. I’ll let Paramount make their own announcement, but it was monstrous tonight. Yeah. Monstrous. Like, he’s, you know … you don’t get calls from billionaires flipping out too often. So he is extremely excited. I’ll let them do their thing.”
White said that there were nearly 200,000 fans that passed through the Ellipse park below the White House over the past two days, and merch sales for the event were through the roof. And of course there was the weather, which was looking like it might wreck the whole event.
“I thought the weather was perfect last night,” the UFC CEO said. “The weather was actually better tonight. We were sweating the storm all day. Beautiful all day, and then it’s looking like from 6 to 9, there’s gonna be a storm. And this is f–king crazy, but the storm literally split and went around the White House. And the breeze was perfect. I mean, just everything, you couldn’t have had a better night. It was absolutely perfect. Just enough wind to keep the bugs off us. All the s–t that I was worried about played out perfectly.”
“Production was off the charts. I mean, if you look at what we did, we built an arena on the White House lawn. That was amazing. But if you look at what we did at the Ellipse, it’s almost more impressive than what we did on the South Lawn.”
Even though things went well, the potential for everything to go to hell made White even more anti-outdoors than he was before.
“I don’t ever wanna f–king be outside ever again,” he declared. “There’s just too much leading up to the fight. You just have to sweat. Unless you’re in, like, Abu Dhabi when we did it before. I could be the weatherman in Abu Dhabi, and I’d be right all the time.”
That doesn’t mean the UFC won’t continue to partner up with the U.S. government for more events.
“Well, the president and I are talking about doing a ‘Fight for the Troops’ next year,” White revealed. “We did a lot of them in the past … So we’re talking about doing it next year. He wanted to do it this year, and I said, ‘Sir, I need a year to recover financially from the White House fight. So give me a year.'”
In the end, White is happy to leave Washington, D.C. feeling like he delivered the event he wanted to deliver.
“Listen: I love this country, and this event was for America’s 250th birthday,” White said. “There was no other political agenda for this event or anything like that. The fact that the President of the United States entrusted me to — they could have had anything. They could have put any kind of performance on. And like I said, there’s tons of things going on in this city up until July 4th to celebrate. The fact that he trusted me to do this and to deliver tonight? And we did.”
“I did all the media. We went to New York. I did far left, I did far right, I did down the middle. I did it all. And I believe that if you are an American, no matter where you sit politically, tonight was a proud night to just sit around and enjoy the 250th [birthday] of America. I was just honored to be the person that he trusted to deliver tonight. I hope everybody as an American feels that we did.”
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