Dana White was at his favorite event last night (the one with his name on it). And he got to hand out minimum contracts to fighters who managed to impress him the most. Last night that included someone who had been working as his personal assistant.
After the show White took questions from reporters. Predictably a lot of those questions were about his questionable levels of involvement with the biggest upcoming fight on the calendar: Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua. This gave him a chance to drop expletives and rail against his current number one nemesis Eddie Hearn.
It wasn’t all Hearn-bashing, though. White also got a chance to talk about another of his least favorite people from the world of boxing, Oscar De La Hoya. When it came to him, though, White tried to explain that he was taking the high road.
This latest spat between White and De La Hoya revolves around the recent Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn fight, which was — on paper — a co-promotion between De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions (which represents Garcia) and ZUFFA Boxing (which represents Benn).
Despite this being a co-promotion, it seems that ZUFFA might have strong-armed their way through the deal and managed to control much of what went on around the fight. That would have been thanks to the power of Turki Alashikh, whose pit of Saudi Arabian oil money is propping up ZUFFA Boxing.
De La Hoya certainly believes all that. In recent interviews he’s claimed Golden Boy affiliated staff and boxers were treated poorly at the Garcia vs. Benn fight. He also said he refused to attend the fight because he thought he was being set-up.
The set-up, per reports on MMA Fighting, involved assigning De La Hoya’s tickets that weren’t ringside, but were instead for a celebrity VIP area. “I was not going to show up and be embarrassed, because that’s exactly what they were going to do to me. I was not going to do that. So I made the wise decision to not go,” De La Hoya told Fight Hub TV.
White flatly refuted those claims last night.
“I would never do that,” he said (h/t MMA Fighting). “Listen, my dislike for Oscar De La Hoya is very well known. He knows it, I know it, and it’s mutual.”
White then boasted that, instead of setting someone up with bad tickets, he was more likely to simply call and threaten them.
“I would call and say, ‘Don’t even try and show up to this f*cking fight. You’re not welcome.’ I would never have somebody show up to an event and [embarrass them with bad tickets].”
Bad tickets seem to stoke a particularly tough memory for White. At the press conference he went on to explain how former WWE head honcho Vince McMahon had pulled that play on him when Ronda Rousey debuted in the wrestling ring.
White said he traveled to New Orleans to see Rousey’s first match, but discovered there were no tickets waiting for him. White said he was then given tickets but that they were “in the f*cking bleachers.”
“I’ve been through all that,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that to even an enemy; I wouldn’t do that.”
After saying he would never assign De La Hoya bad tickets, White then went on to talk about the bad tickets that De La Hoya was assigned.
“Oscar knew where he was sitting,” said White. “Oscar was coming in the back, like all the celebrities do, to the celebrity VIP area, and he knew all of that. I’m not saying that in his mind he didn’t think, ‘Maybe these guys are gonna do that,’ but let’s just be straight up and open about this: I would never do that to anybody.”
So, De La Hoya was assigned to sit with celebrities in a VIP section… people who had nothing to do with the fight and not ringside where the promoters generally sit. Got it.
White and De La Hoya’s is a simmering feud, at this point. It’s not getting as many headlines as him and Hearn. That’s mostly thanks to the verbosity of Hearn and how fun that is to write about.
De La Hoya does have some zingers of his own, though. When talking with Yahoo Sports he called White ‘Uncle Fester’ and claimed that White was just playing a role for the cameras while Alashikh pulled all the strings.
This isn’t the first time White has been compared to an errand boy for Alashikh. On Contender Series we just saw a someone with that kind of job get a big promotion. Maybe White’s hoping something similar happens for him one day.