John
10-20-2009, 08:14 PM
Dana White talks to Kevin Iole at Yahoo Sports about how he felt presured during his appearance on Bloomberg to say he'd sell a stake in the UFC:
“This is [expletive] bad; it’s not what I said. Here’s the bottom line: Basically, it was a longer story and he kept asking if we would sell this thing or not. I kept saying ‘No. No, we won’t sell it,’ and I’d go through this whole [expletive] thing about how we’re all 40 years old and we’re young and we’re the visionaries for this thing. We know where we’re taking this thing. We know where it’s going. We have no interest in selling it. And going public? We don’t need the [expletive] money. You go public when you want to raise cash. You raise capital to do something bigger. We don’t want to do that. We’re not looking to do that. He kept [expletive] pushing and pushing. He said, ‘OK, hypothetically speaking, would you ever sell a piece of it?’ I said, ‘I guess we’d sell a tiny little piece. We’d probably sell a tiny little piece.’ But, here’s the thing: I want it to be known that this guy kept pushing me and pushing me. I said ‘No, we wouldn’t go public. No, we wouldn’t sell it.’ At the end of the day, we’re the guys who are driving this thing. We have the vision. We know where we want to take this thing. We’re not interested in selling a piece of this to anybody. Me, Frank and Lorenzo are the three owners. We have an awesome relationship. Everything runs smoothly. It’s perfect. And for us to even offer somebody a piece, it would be the biggest compliment in [expletive] history because they’d have to be a serious strategic partner. It’s the only [expletive] way we’d do it.”
“This is [expletive] bad; it’s not what I said. Here’s the bottom line: Basically, it was a longer story and he kept asking if we would sell this thing or not. I kept saying ‘No. No, we won’t sell it,’ and I’d go through this whole [expletive] thing about how we’re all 40 years old and we’re young and we’re the visionaries for this thing. We know where we’re taking this thing. We know where it’s going. We have no interest in selling it. And going public? We don’t need the [expletive] money. You go public when you want to raise cash. You raise capital to do something bigger. We don’t want to do that. We’re not looking to do that. He kept [expletive] pushing and pushing. He said, ‘OK, hypothetically speaking, would you ever sell a piece of it?’ I said, ‘I guess we’d sell a tiny little piece. We’d probably sell a tiny little piece.’ But, here’s the thing: I want it to be known that this guy kept pushing me and pushing me. I said ‘No, we wouldn’t go public. No, we wouldn’t sell it.’ At the end of the day, we’re the guys who are driving this thing. We have the vision. We know where we want to take this thing. We’re not interested in selling a piece of this to anybody. Me, Frank and Lorenzo are the three owners. We have an awesome relationship. Everything runs smoothly. It’s perfect. And for us to even offer somebody a piece, it would be the biggest compliment in [expletive] history because they’d have to be a serious strategic partner. It’s the only [expletive] way we’d do it.”