Dana White spoke with Fox Sports about the announced main event for the UFC's debut on Fox between UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos. A transcript of White's responses is below.
Why was Cain Velasquez vs. Junior dos Santos so appealing to you?
It's our first time ever, as far as I'm concerned, on mainstream television, on the biggest, baddest network in the United States.
You have to put your best foot forward, and we have to go with the most prestigous championship in all of sports, the heavyweight championship, the heavyweight title. But more important than that, is actually, to say that, that's like saying if we were in boxing, we'd be throwing the Klitschkos in there, which would put everybody to sleep. You'd have all these millions of people tune in, and go to sleep in the first two-and-a-half minutes of the fight. These two, Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos, are going to go to war. It's going to be an incredible fight, and it was the absolute right fight to make for the first fight on Fox.
What prompted you to take such a huge fight off of pay-per-view and put it on free television?You have to put your best foot forward, and we have to go with the most prestigous championship in all of sports, the heavyweight championship, the heavyweight title. But more important than that, is actually, to say that, that's like saying if we were in boxing, we'd be throwing the Klitschkos in there, which would put everybody to sleep. You'd have all these millions of people tune in, and go to sleep in the first two-and-a-half minutes of the fight. These two, Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos, are going to go to war. It's going to be an incredible fight, and it was the absolute right fight to make for the first fight on Fox.
The way that we built our business over the last ten year is long-term thinking. Long-term thinking. You deliver things like this, you know, and you create more fans, and the fans that we've had for years appreciate the fact that when we have thirteen pay-per-views a year, that we give them some big fights for free too.
With Velasquez-dos Santos as the only fight, what else can fans expect to see?
Well, obviously, we're gonna-- when we first go live, we're gonna tune in. We're on Fox. We're gonna kind of set it up a little bit, kinda set up the fight, walk through the heavyweight division. Kind of educate people on what's going on. And then we'll get into the fight. And the fight is five rounds. If it goes the five rounds -- which I don't think it will, but who the hell knows, anything can happen -- then we're golden. If it goes early, we'll have a bunch of fights in the can that we can use.
What other fights were you considered to headline the show?
We considered everything. We looked at a lot of different things. What we do is we have a big white board in here. We put all the big guys up on the board. We look at matches to make, and matches that -- because timing has a lot to do with it too. And the Cain Velasquez-Junior dos Santos fight made the most sense.
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