HOUSTON – Dana White thinks he couldn’t have scripted it better if he tried.
While it doesn’t have a location – or a date other than “ASAP” – Francis Ngannou vs. Ciryl Gane has all of the attributes of a promoter’s dream.
“It’s badass,” White said at a UFC 265 post-fight news conference Saturday. “What I love is when we were going into this fight, I was telling everybody and it’s absolutely true. You have two of the best possible heavyweights in the world fighting each other. You have the guy who beat Francis Ngannou, right? And a guy who is undefeated with the whole backstory that you just said, right? This fight got a lot of heat. It created a lot of interest. Ciryl Gane goes out tonight. He looks incredible.”
There are multiple layers to the impending matchup between the UFC heavyweight champion Ngannou (16-3 MMA, 11-2 UFC) and interim titleholder Gane (10-0 MMA, 7-0 UFC). They are former training partners and have ties to France, a country with low high-level mixed martial arts representation.
While it may sound like a storyline out of professional wrestling, it’s not. It’s real life – and the UFC president isn’t complaining about the foreseen promotability, especially with mixed martial arts now legal in France.
“Like he said earlier, we’ve been working a long time on getting France,” White said. “France is open now and we just got a TV deal in France. Here we are. What you always want to do when you either build fighters or build fights or put on fights is you want to have the best possible guys fighting each other that you possibly can. It doesn’t get any better than this. You couldn’t write it. You couldn’t script it. F*cking Vince (McMahon) couldn’t have wrote a better script for this whole thing. It’s beautiful.”
Gane defeated “The Black Beast” Derrick Lewis via third-round TKO in the UFC 265 main event Saturday. The win earned Gane the interim title, which was implemented after Ngannou declined to fight on the UFC’s offered timeline of his first title defense and requested an extra few weeks.
As recently as Friday, Ngannou said he had not heard from the UFC as to when he would fight the winner of Saturday’s main event. However, after UFC 265, Ngannou indicated he plans to return “soon” – a sentiment White echoed in the post-fight news conference.
UFC 265 took place Saturday at Toyota Center. The main card streamed on ESPN+ pay-per-view after prelims on ESPN/ESPN+.
Check out White’s full UFC 265 post-fight news conference in the video above.
