Dana White says he was “the only one” who was upset about UFC 229 brawl

Shortly after undefeated UFC lightweight champ Khabib Nurmagomedov submitted Conor McGregor in the main event of UFC 229 earlier this month, he careened over the side of the Octagon and attacked McGregor’s training partner Dillon Danis. Seconds later, McGregor was getting into it with several of Nurmagomedov’s training partners inside the cage. It was a truly chaotic end to an otherwise hugely successful night for the UFC.

In the wake of this post-UFC 229 brawl, dozens of members of the MMA community spoke up to share their distaste for the chaotic scene. Yet UFC President Dana White feels he was the only one that as truly bothered by it.

“For me personally, all the work I put that I put into this the last 20 years of my life… I didn’t want to see it go down like that,” Dana White told ESPN (transcript via For The Win). “I was upset about it. I was the only one. The rest of the world could care less.

“For me, it was just our biggest moment, the most people watching ever, and that’s just not who we are,” he continued. “And it’s not even who Khabib is. He said many time after the fight that he went crazy after the fight and it happens sometimes. This is the fight business. 

“But yeah, I was the most upset guy on the planet after that fight. Nobody else cared.”

While White was very disappointed with the events that followed the UFC 229 headliner, he also sounds proud of how quickly his staff got it under control.

“We had that thing contained in under 40 seconds.I made the decision to not put the belt on [Nurmagomedov] inside the octagon because I didn’t think it was safe, I didn’t think we’d get a good reaction from the fans. We got everyone out of there OK. No fans were hurt, nobody was hurt. Nobody was hurt in this thing and we contained it pretty fast.”

What was your reaction to the post-fight brawl at UFC 229? Was Dana White really the only one who cared about it?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 10/23/2018.