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Dana White basically apologizes for UFC 149
Dana White was pretty hyped for UFC 149 before the event started. Despite all the card changes, he felt like he had an event that would entertain the Calgary fans and live up to the live UFC experience. Unfortunately, rather than some past cards that have fallen apart on paper but ended up barnburners, 149 fizzled badly once the main card began. That led El Presidente to vent his frustration after the fights:
“I said this the other day and it’s true: We make money,” he said. “This company makes money, and I like breaking records. We broke the gate record tonight and I’m embarrassed by it. I was excited when I heard and now I’m embarrassed. The undercard delivered — they were awesome — and the main card did not.”
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“I’m bummed out about it, I don’t know what else to say,” he said. “I’m pretty honest about it. I’m not out here saying that’s the greatest show you’ve ever seen. It wasn’t. When you buy tickets, we come into a market like this, we break the record and do the kind of gate we did because people believe in us. People believe in the UFC, and that when we come to town, we’re going to bring you the best fights possible. And then our guys go out and they deliver. Like I said, this is a partnership between us and the fighters. We do our part and they always do theirs. Unfortunately, I was so excited to stick this one up everybody’s a– that said this card sucked, and we didn’t.”
You can’t argue that. Cheick Kongo and Shawn Jordan engaged in 15 minutes of wall and stall, Tim Boetsch and Hector Lombard stood in front of each other and pawed, and Renan Barao vs Urijah Faber was all leg kicks and hand holding. Not helping was Calgary’s reaction to things … the event featured endless booing and regular derisive chants – ‘Bullshit’ and ‘Refund’ being the two that stick out in my mind. And I’m sure a lot of fans at home were mouthing similar words.
This is one of the problems with a sport like the UFC. You can have a low scoring games in hockey or football and fans don’t seem to mind. But it’s hard not to notice when several fighters lay stanky eggs in the cage. Be it via timidity, bad gameplans, or just stylistic nullification, bad fights suck the life out of an event, and you have to wonder how many events like this a new fan coming off the high of UFC 148 will buy before deciding maybe he’ll watch a sport that doesn’t cost 50 bucks per event instead.
There are 14 Older Comments about Dana White basically apologizes for UFC 149
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voice of reason says:
faber barao was a good technical fight. Not all fights will be a slugfest come on.
kongo jordan was bearable…
lombard boetsch was shit -
kvelertak says:
This is soooo stupid. He knew the card was shit. He knew Lombard was a can crusher. He put the fight on when he should have cancelled the card.
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TheBatmanFan says:
“Dana White was pretty hyped for UFC 149 before the event started.”
dana white is full of shit.
That card looked so lame I didn’t even bother to pirate it.
And it sounds like I did my time and bandwidth a favor.
All these lame ass cards are a real burnout dude.
How many really good cards (not even great mind you) have there been this year?
2, 3?
Out of how many?
18?
And with a monopoly on almost every MMA fighter alive today?
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Still, Dana is never more charming than when he demonstrates that he is MMA’s biggest fanboy.
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voice of reason says:
^true, it makes him seem almost human
i don’t think he knew lombard is a can crusher, after all, how many believed the hype about fedor, nog, wanderlei,….etc who let’s face it, are all can crushers
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kvelertak says:
Not even the same. Lombard has never fought the best.
Nog, Fedor, and Wand fought the best in their day, and then started crushing cans.. well Nog never did.
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Filmdrunk says:
I’m with Dana. I’ve been saying Yves Lavigne is a horrible ref for years.
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voice of reason says:
^ok lets see their records and see how many of their opponents are competitive still/were competitive to begin with at the time of the fight.
Fedor: hendo crocop babalu. 3 out of 30. no, nog doesn’t count and u agree, people think he counts because he crushed a lot of cans..wanderlei: rampage, crocop (got ktfo), tito (lost), vitor (got ktfo) no, saku doesn’t count, he was a grappler 4/35
Nog: barnett, crocop, hendo, werdum, 4/35
ok it’s a quick list might’ve missed some but my point is…a LOT of people see records and think ‘whoa’ without relizing that at least 10 of those names u’ve never heard of/were never good/some even had losing records….
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UFC 149 says:
You can have a low scoring games in hockey or football and fans don’t
seem to mind. But it’s hard not to notice when several fighters lay
stanky eggs in the cage. Be it via timidity, bad gameplans, or just
stylistic nullification, bad fights suck the life out of an event. cagefighterz.com -
it’s hard not to notice when it’s a pay-per-view you’ve paid 50 bucks for not a free event on TV. No one cares if it’s on FX, but PPVs are supposed to be worth the money.
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Kalle says:
Apologies are cheap. If Dana was sincere he’d do something to remiburse the poor bastards who paid for this shitshow.
I’m not saying full refunds but something like 50% off on the next UFC PPV for ticketholders wouldn’t go amiss.
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epic says:
I always order these and this was the first one I passed up in a very, very long time. So glad I did!
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G Funk says:
No matter how often you change your screen name, you can’t change the fact that you post chitty comments.
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Jenny Talia says:
“You can have a low scoring games in hockey or football and fans don’t seem to mind.”
What?! I guess you didn’t watch Euro 2012 – fans were booing their lungs out when Spain started just passing the ball without attacking.
It’s not the low scoring in itself that is the problem, it’s the lack of aggression, skill and/or passion. You may have exciting low scoring games just like you may have exciting fights that go the distance.
