Esther Lin, MMA Fighting
After five acrimonious years, UFC president Dana White is ‘out of the Cris Cyborg business.’
That doesn’t mean he’ll stop trashing her to the press every chance he gets. Following his latest Tuesday Night Contender episode, he spent half the media scrum ragging on Cyborg. And honestly, the stuff he’s saying now following a video from Cyborg where her team added false subtitles to what he said to her at UFC 240 … well, let’s just say it’s a bit harsher than before. And it was pretty harsh before.
“Dealing with her has been a nightmare the entire time she’s been here,” White told the assembled group of reporters (video via The Mac Life). “And I said the other day in the interview with Laura [Sanko], there was a lot of controversy bringing her in in the first place at that time. When I did the interview with Laura, we really didn’t mention the whole her lying on the video about what I said. Her ‘production team’ lying about what I said on the video. It’s been a bad experience dealing with Cyborg from day one.”
”We brought her in after she tested positive for steroids and got done with that,” he continued (Cyborg tested positive in 2012, the UFC signed her in 2015). “We made her a clean athlete with the best drug testing policy in all of sports the entire time she was here which, when she talks about her legacy and her brand, her legacy and her brand, nothing is better than knowing that she’s a clean athlete after testing positive for steroids and all the negativity that surrounded her about being a dirty athlete.”
”We bring her in here, we do all this stuff, and she was just never happy. Never happy, complaining about everything. She was a nightmare to deal with it and at the end of the day, she knows, I know, Amanda Nunes knows, I tried to make that Nunes fight and she doesn’t want it.”
Cyborg has repeatedly said the UFC would only offer the Nunes fight along with a six fight deal. And given how the promotion has slow played her fight schedule and refused to develop women’s featherweight, all while White continues to trash her in the media? Yeah, we’re not surprised that doesn’t interest her much.
But in this interview White once again offered to make a one fight deal to make Nunes vs. Cyborg 2 (no word on if the champion clause that would keep Cyborg locked in with the UFC still applies). Cyborg tweeted soon after that she’d get her management team to contact him, but then the tweet disappeared.
So it seems like it’s business as usual between White and Cyborg: a whole lot of talk and tweets but not many fights getting signed.