It has been four months since the infamous Conor McGregor infamous bus attack in the hours leading up to UFC 223. In the immediate aftermath of the event, some fans were questioning if we would ever see McGregor compete in the UFC again. In fact, this question of whether White wanted to continue doing business with McGregor following the event was directly posed to White himself following the attack, to which White replied:
“Right now, no, absolutely not,” White told reporters. “I mean, do you want to be in business with Conor McGregor right now? Do you want to chase this guy around for interviews and buy his fights? Do you? I don’t think anybody is going to want to right now. I think everybody is going to be pretty disgusted with Conor McGregor right now. Listen, you don’t like Khabib and you don’t like what happened or whatever? Then fight Khabib.
“What happened today was criminal, disgusting, despicable, makes me sick, and we as an organization need to make sure that this never happens again.”
In an interview this week with BBC, Dana White was asked about his thoughts on some fans being perplexed on how such a “disgusting” event could be used to help promote the UFC 229 main event between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor in the first video package the UFC created for the event.
“Well, no, it was definitely something bad that I didn’t expect from anybody,” White said. “And he got in trouble, legally, in New York. He had to go to court, and hire lawyers, and go through lawsuits, and all kinds of stuff that goes along with something like that. And obviously, going into the fight, it’s definitely part of the storyline.”
White was then asked how frustrating it was to have McGregor sidelined because of actions so juvenile and reckless.
“I don’t know if it was frustrating for me because he couldn’t come back because of that. It was more frustrating for me that it happened,” White said.
As to White’s initial comment of ensuring something like this never happened again, he was also asked in the interview if anything in security
“No, because the way that this happened, our security actually did a great job during that whole thing. It was at a time when people were loading onto the buses. Everything was over. Everything was over. And if you look at how much my staff was outnumbered, they actually did a great job in containing and keeping anybody from getting seriously injured.”
Do you believe Conor McGregor’s bus attack should have been included in the promotion of Khabib vs. McGregor?
