Sports and Coronavirus: UFC’s Dana White Does Not See Fans At Live Sports Events Like UFC Fight Shows Until COVID-19 Testing Technology Improves
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
UFC President Dana White told LVSportsBiz.com Tuesday he doesn’t foresee fans being allowed to attend sports events in person until the technology for testing for the novel coronavirus improves.
“Until testing technology gets much better than it is now . . . the president was telling me there’s something coming where you can lick a tab and it will tell you if you have it or not,” White told LVSportsBiz.com in a live streaming interview from Jacksonville, Florida. “When we get to that level of testing, then you can start thinking of having fans again.”
White, the ringmaster for Las Vegas-based Ultimate Fighting Championship, is an old hand at pulling off just about every type of fight show imaginable as the promoter for the world’s biggest, most high-profile MMA fight organization. But nothing White faced before was like the job of staging a UFC event at an arena in Jacksonville, Florida Saturday as the first major national sports event in the U.S amid a pandemic that has claimed more the lives of more than 80,000 Americans.
“I was excited just to get this behind me,” White said. “It was a success in every single way it could have been successful and I had fun at the fights.”
White was exhausted from putting on UFC 249 Saturday night. He’s back at it with UFC fight shows Wednesday and Saturday at the same arena.
Check out our White interview here. Thank you Jeremy Long of FullMetalWorldwide.com for producing this video:
White said UFC has submitted the same COVID-19 game plan documents to Nevada state athletic commission that he did to the state of Florida’s athletic commission agency in hopes of putting on a UFC promotion event May 23 at UFC’s APEX building next-door to the UFC headquarters in the Las Vegas southwest valley.
He hopes to hear back from the Nevada Athletic Commission by this weekend to see if he has the green light to stage the UFC fight event at the APEX.
Other points from the LVSportsBiz.com interview:
^ He’s looking to line up Justin Gaethje and Khabib Nurmagomedov for a fight in September on “Fight Island.”
^ White said President Donald Trump called him after UFC 249 to congratulate on pulling off the fight event Saturday.
^ A UFC 249 fight event originally scheduled for Brooklyn, NY would have generated $5.5 million in gate revenues, but White said he was very happy with the pay-per-view revenues from Saturday’s fight show. “I had a good weekend,” White said of the reported 700,000 plus pay-per-view buys for Saaturday’s UFC 249.
LVSportsBiz.com hopes the UFC ringmaster gets some rest.
Later today, we spoke with Kevin Camper, chief sales officer for Speedway Motorsports Inc., which owns eight NASCAR race track venues including Las Vegas Motor Speedway. NASCAR has a race at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina Sunday. Here’s our chat with Camper:
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