Dana White tends to throw a hissy fit when he doesn’t get what he wants. At least, that’s what Ben Askren thinks.
In 2018, Askren was part of a history-making trade that sent him from ONE Championship to the UFC in exchange for P4P great Demetrious Johnson. While ‘Mighty Mouse’ flourished in his new surroundings, winning both the ONE Flyweight World Grand Prix and the ONE flyweight world championship, Askren struggled to find the same success inside the Octagon that he found in other promotions.
After dropping back-to-back bouts against Jorge Masvidal and Demian Maia, ‘Funky’ laid down his gloves and called it a career.
However, before Askren exited the sport altogether, he found himself at odds with Dana White after the UFC CEO accused him of refusing to fight the best possible opponents and infamously declared that he’d “rather watch flies f*ck than watch Ben Askren fight.”
Funky’ believes White is now doing something similar to Francis Ngannou, who has been regularly accused by White of ducking a fight with the UFC’s current undisputed heavyweight champion, Jon Jones.
“I’ve obviously had the same experience with Dana. And I mostly think Dana does a great job,” Askren said on his Funky and The Champ podcast with Daniel Cormier. “Obviously as a businessman, he does an amazing job. I think he showed a lot of courage when he brought the UFC back before all the professional sports, I respect that a lot…to which point Dana spent years saying I didn’t want to fight the best, didn’t want challenges, I was running away. And that couldn’t’ve been further from the truth. So it sucked for this guy, it’s essentially slander, saying things about me that I knew weren’t true…
“Dana has this part of his personality when he can’t get what he wants, and in that case, he didn’t offer me a contract. He did the same thing with Cyborg, I believe Randy Couture had a similar experience, Francis…but there’s this weird part of Dana’s personality where if he can’t get exactly what he wants, he starts crapping on people.
“And because he has a big microphone and he’s generally very truthful, and correct, so people just believe him…I had to deal with many years of Dana telling lies about me that were just really harmful. He had no reason or basis for doing [it]…it’s a really big negative, I don’t know why he’s like that, and it doesn’t really make sense given the stature and power he has, for him to throw fits when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants” (h/t BJPenn.com).
Francis Ngannou makes a splash in his PFL debut while his feud with Dana White Rages on
White and Ngannou have been traded barbs over the last several weeks with the UFC CEO recently claiming that he wanted to cut ‘The Predator’ from his UFC contract after he’d lost back-to-back bouts against Stipe Miocic and Derrick Henry. White claimed that Ngannou was “not a good person” and only kept him on the roster after two other UFC associates convinced him to give the Cameroonian another chance.
Whether or not that’s true or not is now irrelevant as Ngannou went on to capture the heavyweight division’s top prize before exiting the promotion to score a bigger bag under the PFL banner.
Ngannou recently made his promotional debut at the ‘Battle of the Giants’ pay-per-view in Saudi Arabia, landing a dominant first-round TKO against Renan Ferreira.
