http://mmajunkie.com/news/30633/dana-white-says-fighters-can-prevent-future-ufc-cancellations-boxing-may-provide-answer.mmaLAS VEGAS – In recent times, it seems injuries have become the UFC's biggest challenge.
In the past few weeks, the promotion was forced to cancel UFC 151 just days before Jon Jones was scheduled to face Dan Henderson, and UFC 153 took some serious reshuffling after headliner Jose Aldo and co-main-event fighter Quinton "Rampage" Jackson were each forced to withdraw.
So how can the UFC prevent this from ever happening again? MMAjunkie.com (
www.mmajunkie.com) and a small group of reporters asked UFC President Dana White exactly that, and some of his answers may surprise you. White believes, in many ways, his hands are tied and that fighters should perhaps look to boxing for a few tips.
White, UFC 152 fighter Michael Bisping and his new boxing trainer, veteran coach Jason Parillo, sat down at Zuffa headquarters for nearly 90 minutes to speak on numerous subjects. Below are several excerpts from the conversation that pertained to the recent rash of injuries and what it's going to take to stem the tide of bad luck that has overcome the promotion in recent months.
MMAjunkie.com: Are there any lessons to be learned from the cancellation of UFC 151? Is there anything you can do to make sure that never happens again?
White: Yeah, the fighters need to let us know ahead of time they're hurt. Don't try to ride it out and say, 'We'll see if I feel better.' We've always had this weird relationship with Henderson. When Lorenzo and I went to dinner with him when he came to get his knee checked, he was like, 'I thought for sure you guys were going to tell me I have to fight.' Dude, we don't do that to anybody. We've never in the history of this company told somebody that they have to fight. We don't make people fight. He said PRIDE used to do some real dirty [expletive]. I said, 'Well, we don't, contrary to popular [expletive] belief. We don't.'
If you're hurt, you're hurt. We never send somebody out there hurt. What you do is you go to the doctor. The doctor checks you out. All these guys have some nagging injuries when they go in there and fight. Nobody is ever 100 percent, like, 'I feel fantastic.' So you go in and see the doctor, and the doctor is like, 'Yeah, you've got this problem here, but you can absolutely fight on that.' Or, 'Eh, if you move laterally, you might have a little weakness in the knee.' Or, 'I wouldn't fight if I were you. I would get surgery first.' Those are the options you get from doctors, and at the end of the day, it's up to the fighter. We don't sit there and go, 'Hey, he said lateral movement might go out sometimes – not all of the fight, just some of the fight. Don't move laterally.' We don't do that. If guys want to fight, they can fight. If they don't, we would never force a guy to fight.
Billy Mira, KOMP FM: Do you think that's why we see more fighters pulling out of fights now – because there's more at stake?
White: First of all, I've been so tired answering this question over the last couple of days. Fighter insurance. Too many events. The list goes on and on. The problem is, and I had a conversation with somebody yesterday – and I won't say who it is – but I was trying to put this fight together, and I'm calling people. We've talked about this for a long time, and you don't know what guys are getting paid, but the biggest problem is we've got too many rich guys – too many guys that are rich as [expletive]. Money is the biggest detriment to the fight business. It really is.
Back in the old days when we were just getting going, dudes had to pay the rent. … Once the money starts to pile up? You've got some of these guys with a few million in the bank. Getting punched in the face every day isn't too [expletive] cool. But when guys are hungry and they want that [expletive] money, and they want to get out there and get more of it and more of it and more of it? I told one of the fighters yesterday, 'You know what your problem is? You're fat and rich right now. That's what your problem is. You're laying around with all your money in the bank. Back in the day, you would have been training and been in shape.' He said, 'Dana, you're absolutely [expletive] right. You're absolutely right. I'm going to get in shape.'
Then there's different scenarios, like when you talk about Lyoto Machida and (Mauricio) "Shogun" Rua – two guys that have already lost to Jon Jones. "If I lose to this guy one more time, where does that put me?" They're thinking, "Where does this put me if I lose again? Do I have to re-invent myself and got to 185 pounds? I'll never get another 205-pound title shot for another year or longer."
It's so easy to go, "Fighter insurance!" Fighter insurance is the greatest "expletive" thing that could ever happen in the history of the fight business. The fact that we've got these guys covered medically – they were always covered for fights, whatever damage happened to them in a fight, but most of the problems happen in training. So there were situations where a guy would blow his [expletive] knee out, and knee surgery is expensive as [expletive]. You can't make any money. You can't this and that. Guys would come in with a knee injury and fight and say, "Oh, I blew my knee out in the fight," and get their knee fixed. That's not saving a [expletive] fight! That's stupid. That's ridiculous. That's why we wanted health insurance.
If you blow your [expletive] knee out, you get your knee fixed. Then you come back and you fight. You shouldn't have that stress and all the damage it can do to your life over an injury. We fixed that. That's a good thing. That's never a bad thing, and people that say that are [expletive] nuts.
And how about [critics' claims] that we're doing too many fights? That's why there's so many injuries. OK. So let's say we have three [expletive] fights a year instead of however many we have now. People are still going to get hurt. There will be less injuries because there will be less [expletive] fights! And less guys under contract. Less fights means less guys under contract. Less fights means less weight divisions. We have less fights, we don't have the 155-pound weight division and under. We're back at 170 pounds and up. And of course there's going to be more injuries. There's more [expletive] fighters training. I mean seriously, that somebody would ask me that question?
The only way it can be explained is it's a string of horrible [expletive] luck. We don't have the first two guys on the card falling out. We've got the main and co-main event falling out, which is the worst [expletive] thing that could happen to you. That's what's been happening to us. And that's just bad luck, and that's going to happen.
Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports: How much of it is the training aspect of it and the fact that the fighters train insanely hard and put their body at risk for more injury?
Bisping: For me, I try to make sure I train with guys I can trust and experienced guys. A lot of the times, injuries happen when you train with people you don't trust or guys that don't really know what they're doing. You've got to train hard. You've got to train the way you fight, in my opinion, otherwise when fight time comes, you're body is not prepared for it. Training is where the injuries happen, but a lot of it comes down to sparring partners or training partners and wrestling. Wrestling is always a big one.
The reason I say good training partners is because there will be certain times, say if a guy's got me clinched up or whatever, and he's going to take me down. I feel my leg is wedged, and he can pull me a certain way. I'll go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. I'll give you the [expletive] takedown. I'll lie down. If you would have taken that there my leg would have snapped off. Or they may might see it and go, "Yo, bro, move your leg there," or whatever. If the guy's an [expletive], he's going to just go for it because they get that little bit of ego for that moment in time in the gym. "Oh, I [expletive] took him down."
White: That's the different mentality in mixed martial arts. In boxing, when you built a camp and you brought guys in as sparring partners, they were there to work for you. They're not in there to [expletive] knock you out. They're in there for you to beat the [expletive] out of. They're in there to get you work so you can get in the best shape you can possibly be in, emulate the style of your opponent, and the list goes on an on.
In MMA, and I'll use Greg Jackson as an example because I'd like to kick him in the balls as much as possible over the next couple of weeks, there was a situation with Greg Jackson where he had so many guys training together in his gym, and they were doing drills, and Rashad Evans rolled over doing a move on to Diego Sanchez's leg and popped his knee out. So Diego Sanchez was out, has to have knee surgery and everything else because he was training too close to these guys. I've heard other fighters tell me that there's a lot of other [expletive] at Jackson's where guys can get injured.
I'm singling him out because I'm a [expletive], but it goes on in everyone else's camp, too. Dan Henderson – Dan Henderson is in the last 30 seconds of the last round on the last day of sparring, and Sokoudjou goes to throw him with a judo throw. Pops his knee out. It was almost over. There were 30 seconds left. In the last 30 seconds? What are you getting out of the last 30 seconds? He goes to throw him in some crazy judo throw and pops Dan's knee out. It's just one of those things.
And when you talk about injuries, Aldo got hit by a [expletive] car. It's just – we're going through a string of bad luck right now.
Brett Okamoto, ESPN.com: So you guys don't have conversations on how we can improve this? You just chalk it up completely to bad luck because what can you do, really?
White: Yeah. I mean, what am I going to do? Go camp to camp and start getting involved with their training? Let me tell you what: I butt heads with trainers a lot. I've butted heads with [Bisping's] camp. I've butted heads with B.J. Penn. I've butted heads with these other guys, and realistically, I'm trying to do what's best for the show and for the fights, but when I'm calling a camp, they're like, "Is this [expletive] jamoke calling us and telling us how to train? Really? Seriously? We've got to listen to your [expletive] when we show up to the press conferences and stuff. You're going to be calling us and getting us involved in our training camp?"
"Hey guys, this is Dana. I want to know what's going on with Bisping today." You can't. You can't [expletive] do it. These guys have their own camps, their own training. It just needs to be more like boxing in that when a guy would go into a boxing camp, it was really all about that guy. The difference in MMA is they'll get together with five or six other guys that are training for fights, and they're all going it at like they're the [expletive] guy. The focus isn't on one guy, it's on five or six other guys in the gym that are all training at the same time, and they're all going balls out, and that's not the way it's supposed to be in training. That's my humble opinion on the training.
MMAjunkie.com: In terms of having less cards, people seem to think that if you have less cards, the cards would be deeper, and if you had an injury, you could stick with the card.
White: But it wouldn't be deeper. I'd have less guys under contract. I'd be cultivating less talent around the world in every weight division. For the thing to grow, you've got to have more fights. You've got to have more weight classes. You have to have more fighters training and coming up through the ranks and more ability to make money. More people are going to gravitate toward the sport the more money that gets involved.
I'm a tremendous athlete. Am I going to play baseball or become a mixed-martial-artist? Am I going to play football or become a mixed-martial-artist? The more money, the more weight classes, the more fights, it's what needs to be done for the sport to grow. And there's demand for it. It's not like we're putting on all these fights and three people are showing up. We're still breaking records.
Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports: Do you think one of the issues is that there are so few major camps out there – you haven't developed, like boxing, this whole list of great trainers and guys to go to so you have a lot of people congregating in the same spot – that you end up not only with the problem of guys not wanting to fight each other but fighters in other camps maybe being not as prepared? Do you think that needs to change?
White: I do. It's like I said, in boxing, I make this fight. One guy builds camp around himself. The other guy builds a camp around himself, and the guys train for this thing. In boxing, you saw guys like Larry Holmes. Larry Holmes was Muhammad Ali's sparring partner for years. Then Larry Holmes had to whoop Muhammad Ali's ass one day. But that's how those guys became better. They were sparring partners. But the bottom line is, even though Larry Holmes was as good as he was, it was about Muhammad Ali. You were coming in to work with Ali. You're not there to whoop his ass, blow his knee out and knock him out. You're there to work, and the trainers would control the sparring and how it went down.
In this business, it's like you have 50 guys. We put on UFC 153. Now you've got Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Anderson Silva, Erick Silva and all the guys that are in that camp all going to camp together and training together, and it's not about one guy. It's about everybody needing to get theirs because we're all fighting. That's what's different, and I believe it is what's creating a lot of injuries.
MMAjunkie.com: But it would really only be the top-level fighters that would be able to set up their camp that way, right?
White: Yeah, because the younger guys come up, and they're part of that camp, too, until they make it big enough to make the big money.
Parillo: It's like in boxing. In boxing, the low-level guys aren't making any money. When they're fighting, they've got to figure it out and figure out how to make it. They might lay carpet all day long and then go fight at night. The thing in MMA compared to boxing, in boxing you've got one coach. In MMA, you've got a wrestling coach, a kickboxing coach, and so on. You've got so many chiefs, and it becomes a big cluster[expletive] at times.
Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports: So do you need to have one guy who's in charge of all coaching?
Bisping: You can't really do that. There's not many guys out there that could be at Jason's level of boxing coach, a high-level jiu-jitsu expert, a wrestling master, a strength-and-conditioning guru. You're talking about a severely qualified individual, and he's going to charge a [expletive]load of money.
Parillo: Well, you get five coaches that all have an ego as big as the fighter. Now trying to get one guy to be the head honcho is a very difficult thing to do.
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