UFC President Dana White has had some problems negotiating recently with two of the UFC's biggest fighters.
UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor, perhaps the most famous fighter in MMA today, seems to be in an extended, semi-self-imposed hiatus after a public dispute with UFC brass over money.
Nate Diaz, the popular anti-hero who defeated McGregor in a welterweight match in March, is willing to grant a rematch with McGregor but wants the kind of payday typically reserved for boxers. Their original rematch was set for the cornerstone UFC 200 card on July 9, but McGregor was pulled from the fight in April because he would not attend a media event.
White commented on both fighters' situations Thursday afternoon during an interview on The Herd with Colin Cowherd, which airs on Fox Sports 1 (h/t Shaun Al-Shatti of MMA Fighting).
The crux of White's argument? Both men are under contract, and as such don't have the ability to negotiate terms for individual fights:
What drives me crazy is when you have a contract. Everybody sits down at one point and we do a deal. Everybody is happy. You shake hands, you hug. And then we move onto the next fight and everybody wants to blow up the deal. ...What you try to do in a deal like this is you try to be as fair as you can be, and obviously the problem is that we have a deal. We already have a deal. [Diaz] has a contract. Conor has a deal. It's not like we went in and renegotiated.
Regarding Diaz, UFC brass recently paid a widely publicized visit to Diaz's home base in California to personally negotiate terms of a Diaz-McGregor rematch for a date beyond UFC 200. But, as White himself indicated at the time, the meeting didn't go well, and no agreement was reached after White stormed out of the meeting.
— Dana White (@danawhite) May 19, 2016
During Thursday's interview with Cowherd, the UFC president offered more specifics on the ill-fated meeting with Diaz.
"It wasn't necessarily as much Nate Diaz as it was the management, but yeah, I [was frustrated]," White said. "Nate, we signed a new deal going into that fight, then he signed the contract for UFC 200. So then Conor doesn't show up for UFC 200, and now Nate is trying to blow up the deal."
The UFC 200 rematch was scuttled because of the company's dispute with McGregor, but it's still a possibility for UFC 202, scheduled for August. According to White, talks for that date are ongoing, but prospects may be dim, because Diaz and his team are insisting on a major payday and because White said he has already organized the entire card.
"We've been going back and forth and trying to make this fight happen, but the problem is timing," White said. "Now we're running out of time, because. ...I've already got that card made, it's done, and now we're moving onto the next one. So we're going to get to a point here where we're going to run out of time and we're just not going to be able to make the fight."
