Aljamain Sterling made his way to T-Mobile Arena for the UFC’s final pay-per-view of the year. Unfortunately, the ‘Funk Master’ was never able to make it past the front door.
Asked about the situation during his appearance at the UFC 296 post-fight press event, Dana White addressed Sterling’s issue with gaining access to the event by saying:
“Well they were tickets that … he was with a sponsor. I don’t know how they got pulled or what happened, but the team reached right out to him, and he was like, ‘Yeah, never mind, I’m good, I’m gonna leave’” (h/t BJPenn.com).
Reacting to White’s take on the incident via his YouTube channel, Sterling was left admittedly confused by White’s comment, noting that he has always gone through the UFC to attend a live event and not through a sponsor or some other third-party source.
“I’m not trying to fan the flames, I just think somewhere there was a little bit of a disconnect,” Sterling said. “The only thing I didn’t understand was someone sent me a clip of I guess Dana saying that the tickets were through a sponsor. I don’t know what that was about because I’ve never had tickets from a sponsor for any of the UFC fights, I always go through the same exact channels every single time.
“This is the first time that that’s actually happened so … that was weird. I don’t know if that was like what someone told him, but no, I actually asked for tickets through the UFC channels.”
Though he missed out on catching all the action of UFC 296 live, ‘Funk Master’ did take in the event at a local bar.
Aljamain Sterling has been out of action since suffering a second-round knockout loss to Sean O’Malley at UFC 292, surrendering his bantamweight world title in the process. Since then, Sterling has teased a potential move to featherweight in 2024 with the hopes of welcoming back top-ten-ranked contender Calvin Kattar to the Octagon.
Before his loss against O’Malley, Sterling was riding a nine-fight win streak.