Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) President, Dana White, believes he knows exactly why Power Slap League has received as much negativity as it has.
Upon the initial announcement that White was starting up his new slap-fighting project, members of the mixed martial arts (MMA) community were instantly uninterested. The lack of defense and willingness to take open-handed strikes seemed like a guarantee for traumatic brain injury (and still does).
It didn’t help that one week before the series’ launch, White was caught on video slapping his wife, Anne White, in a nightclub altercation. The Power Slap season debut was postponed one week as a result, and after an alright start in viewership, numbers have drastically plummeted.
“Everything that’s negative that’s being said about it is an attack on me,” White told Bussin’ With the Boys (h/t MiddleEasy). “It’s me that these guys are attacking it’s not the actual slapping. The media, it’s all about me. Okay? They want to f—k me that’s why they’re saying what they’re saying about slap.
“This s—t was going on, this has been on the internet since ’17 is when I first saw it,” he continued. “There’s 350 million views but I’m the only f—king guy who has seen it? There’s no stories written there’s no, ‘Oh my god this is horrible, how’s this on social media? Children are watching this.’ This has been going on since f—ing, well, I noticed in ’17. It could have been before that for all I know. But now it’s horrible and it’s a tragedy and it needs to go away?”
Meanwhile over in White’s primary focus, UFC, the promotion’s third straight big pay-per-view (PPV) event, UFC 285, goes down this weekend (Sat., March 4, 2023) in Las Vegas, Nevada’s T-Mobile Arena.