White Buries ‘D*ckhead’ Who Leaked UFC Safety Plan

Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) President Dana White has been bragging to the mixed martial arts (MMA) media about the success of his operations plan, which established health and safety protocols for those athletes — as well as staff and media — on the ground in Jacksonville, Florida.

The simpleton’s version? Coronavirus is bad, social distancing is good.

But in absence of any measurable data to support or refute White’s claims, all we had to work with were a few arbitrary numbers (1200 tests per week!) and those gratuitous Twitter videos featuring “Sunshine State” fighters with cotton swabs jammed up their noses.

Yuck.

Then a reporter from The New York Times (NYT) leaked a copy of the promotion’s “Jacksonville Event Operations Plan” (read it here), which outlined a boatload of precautionary measures to help combat the spread of COVID-19. Unfortunately, said measures were not followed to the letter of the law.

NYT referred to the coverage as “spotty.”

“A lot of criticism coming into this week, the fact that we wanted to go, and this dickhead from The New York Times that found out MMA was popular,” White said (via MMA Junkie). “We’ve had two events now, all the testing that we’ve done, we’ve had one positive. I don’t want to shoot my mouth off – we still have one more to go – but so far, so good. So far it’s been super successful.”

As of this writing, UFC is working its way through three MMA events in Jacksonville. The first, UFC 249 back on May 9, lost a fighter to coronavirus after the weigh ins. The second, which took place just last night on ESPN+, went off without a hitch.

The third pops off this Sat. night (May 16) on ESPN.

“Fuck that guy,” White continued. “You know what happened with that guy? That guy who’s never covered the sport was writing a story about Endeavor … and what happened when this guy and this paper covered the UFC – when they’ve never covered it before? What do you think happened? This fucking story was huge. They did killer traffic. Now they’re writing stories, three a week, and they’re posting live results.”

Endeavor, parent company of UFC, has been in the news over the last few weeks for its financial crisis, which had a direct effect on the promotion’s timeline for return. The spin from White, however, puts UFC at the forefront of the “get back to our normal way of life” movement while hoping to pave the way for other major sports.

We’ll certainly have more answers after this weekend’s event in Jacksonville.