Dana White has high expectations for the upcoming UFC
300 card, which goes down at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on
April 13.
With the promotion’s early struggles, White had imagined he would
be in his 70s by the time UFC
100 came around. However, things took off and the
Ultimate Fighting Championship emerged as an industry leader,
hosting cards almost every weekend with its 300th event on the
horizon.
“I’ll tell you a story, so me and Lorenzo [Fertitta] are at the Taj
Mahal in Atlantic City when we first started putting on these
events,” White told TNT
Sports. “And we’re walking down home and there are these two
old men and they’re fighting, screaming at each other in the
hallway. Lorenzo was like, ‘That’s gonna be me and you at UFC 100.’
This is UFC 31 or something, 100 seemed like it was gonna be –
we’re doing five events a year – so we were figuring we’d be in our
seventies when UFC 100 would come. Obviously, thing took off and
we’re doing 44 events a year so 100 came quick and here I am
talking about 300.”
White has made an effort to make the card one of the deepest in
promotion history. During the interview, the UFC CEO pulled up a
list detailing the fighters’ statistics for the card. According to
White, UFC 300 is expected to break every record at the T-Mobile
Arena with a $15 million gate.
“This time we’re looking at, ‘How do we make 300 different than
100, 200 and anything that we’ve ever done?’ What I wanted was, I
wanted it to be, when the first prelim of the night starts, you
have to be in front of your television. You can’t miss one fight on
this card,” White said.
“So, when you look at 300 right, we have 12 current and former UFC
champions or interim champions, seven pound-for-pound [ranked]
fighters, almost every single fight features a ranked contender, 16
ranked fighters in total. And it’s expected to break every record
at the T-Mobile Arena with a $15 million gate. So, UFC 300 is the
greatest combat sports card ever assembled. I mean if you go back
throughout history, even boxing. Look at a boxing card that has
ever been done, even in the Don King days, when he was stacking
these cards full. The first prelim of the night is [Deiveson]
Figueiredo and Cody
Garbrandt, then it’s just all the way up to the main
event.”
The UFC has been having a great year so far in terms of
pay-per-view success.
UFC 297 at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, Canada in January
became the highest arena gate in the country’s history.
UFC 298 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, in February
became the highest-grossing MMA event in California history. And
Conor McGregor as half of the headliner. All three crossed the
$15 million marker, two of which,
UFC 229 ($17.7 million) and
UFC 264 ($15.75 million), went down at the T-Mobile Arena in
Las Vegas.
After months of White teasing an unbelievable card, fans had mixed
reactions to the announcement of the featured bouts at UFC 300.
While the card undoubtedly runs deep with the likes of Jiri
Prochazka and Aljamain
Sterling fighting on the prelims, fans are not immensely
impressed with the main and co-main events. Light heavyweight champ
Alex
Pereira defends his strap against Jamahal
Hill in the headliner, and women’s strawweight champ Weili Zhang
defends her title against Xiaonan Yan
in the co-main. While these are high-caliber matchups, they failed
to meet certain expectations after White at one point said that
fans „couldn’t even handle the main event.“