UFC President Dana White may have repeatedly stated that his relationship with superstar featherweight champion Conor McGregor is not strained by the Irishman’s recent refusal to attend to today’s (Friday, April 22, 2016) UFC 200 press conference and subsequent short-lived ‘retirement,’ but that apparently doesn’t mean he’s going to lift his decision to remove him from the midsummer blockbuster.
At the press event today, White was asked nonstop questions about McGregor’s availability for the card. He responded by noting all of the high-profile fighters wanted to be doing training rather than promoting, but that’s just not how the game works:
“Listen, I just don’t see how that’s fair, you know what I mean? He came in from Stockton day ago, Poland, Brazil, and the list goes on and on from where these fighters have come from all over the world. And I get it; it’s tough when you have to leave everything you got going on. The fight is three months away; the fight’s still three months away. That’s why we do it this early, so we try not to interfere with their training and their lives and everything else. It’s just part of the deal; these guys came. Listen, I was talking to some of the guys backstage, the fighters, they would like Conor to fight on the card too. People want Conor to fight – so do the fans, the media, you think I don’t want Conor to fight? Of course I do. But it’s just not right. You can’t not show up for this stuff. You can’t do. It’s not right.”
Continually prodded to confirm McGregor was truly out of arguably the biggest card in UFC history, a clearly annoyed White finally confirmed it:
“Yeah. Yes, Holy s***”
As for the reported news that longtime former welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre was offered a fight with top-ranked lightweight Khabib Nurmagomedov, White said he hadn’t heard of anything like that:
“To the best of my knowledge, that is completely inaccurate. Yeah, I wasn’t in that meeting.”
But the discussion predictably went back to McGregor, and White was none too pleased that hose asing the questions didn’t grasp the unfairness or the UFC’s desire to not set a precedent of one fighter calling the shots.
Read on to find out what the steaming executive had to say about McGregor to the media….
The post Dana White Confirms Conor McGregor Is Officially Off UFC 200 appeared first on LowKick MMA.