Over the last couple of days there were a few reports regarding the fact that Dana White had agreed to meet with Ricardo Arona, and if you’re saying, ‘ya so effin what?’, you haven’t been watching enough “Best of Pride.” For several years Arona was a beast while fighting in Japan, earning wins over Kazushi Sakuraba (which completely re-defined the meaning of ‘this is getting ugly’), Wanderlei Silva, Dan Henderson and Alistair Overeem. Yeah, just a couple of noteworthy dudes in there…
Now granted, if you’re an old school fan and don’t care about Arona possibly heading to the UFC, due to the fact his ground-and-pound style hasn’t always produced mind blowing action, fair enough. But you have to admit, depending on what Arona returns to MMA (he’s fought just once since 2007), he could punish a few notable fighters in the Octagon. According to the Brazilian publication Tatame, not only has Arona met with the UFC boss man, the meeting went really well.
“It was better than I expected, because he is a very busy guy, we’ve been seeing this great event, a great show he is promoting. It was a while since we last spoke and there were some rumors in the internet, some interviews… What really happened was that he said he was really glad to see me here, asked about my last fight, where it was, how it was and I told him and also said I wanted an opportunity to rejoin the event on the end of the year, a chance to be here and he said he wanted me on his event…”
Arona also discussed his knee injury, a possible rematch with Rampage Jackson and more; check out it here.