Dana White had a tense exchange with a reporter over potential changes to the Muhammad Ali Act during Thursday’s press conference to promote this weekend’s blockbuster matchup between world champions Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez and Terence Crawford.
Saturday’s fight, billed as one of the biggest matchups available in the current generation of top-level boxing, represents White’s first true foray into the sport and comes several years after the UFC CEO first stated his desire to try his hand in boxing promotion.
White has stated that he intends to transplant some of the business practices that have been successful in his UFC model towards boxing, such as hold regular ‘Contender Series’ style fight cards to build the reputations of up and coming fighters before they graduate to a ‘bigger’ card held by Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and boxing primary money man and power broker nowadays.
However, White was questioned on Thursday about his stance on the Ali act which aims to ensure that monopolies cannot take over the sport by instituting their own rankings and title belts, among other elements.
Among the terms of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act, ‘unified boxing organisations’ would permit a promotional entity to have their own world titles. And when questioned by reporter Sean Zittel about these issues, White said the press event was not the platform to discuss such issues.
“This is obviously a long discussion. If you want to talk to me about that, set up an interview. This isn’t about me and my business, this is about these two guys on Saturday night.”
White added when Zittel followed up: “I get it, you want to showboat right now. Set up an interview if this is really what you want to talk about.
“Let’s do it in private and we can do an interview. If you want to showboat, I get it. If you have questions for these two that are fighting on Saturday, that’s a different story.
“This isn’t a discussion to have at a press conference where these two are going to fight on Saturday, two legends. If you want to set up an interview and ask me these questions one on one, let’s do it and you can ask me anything you want.
“You have a question for these two? No? Beat it.”
You can watch the press conference in its entirety above.
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