For a guy who insists that he doesn’t think about Francis Ngannou very often, UFC CEO Dana White sure has had a lot to say about him over the past week.
Some of it was very personal. All of it was pretty negative. Some parts just didn’t make a lot of sense.
For instance, White would very much like us to know that he wanted Ngannou out of the UFC a long time ago. After a unanimous decision loss in a boring fight with Derrick Lewis in 2018, White said, “I wanted to cut him.” He was talked out of it by other UFC executives, which would seem like a good thing since Ngannou won his next five fights, all by knockout, and became UFC heavyweight champion.
But no, White said. He still wanted the big fella gone. Why? Because he’s a bad person.
“I didn’t like Francis as a person,” White said at the UFC 308 post-fight press conference on Saturday. “He wasn’t a guy I wanted to do business with. I didn’t like Francis. My boys were telling me he’s misunderstood, and I told them when somebody shows you who they are, believe them. It wasn’t about him becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. Francis isn’t a good guy. He plays the good guy — ‘I don’t understand the language’ — so he seems like he’s a nice guy. He’s not. He’s just not a guy that I wanted to be in business with, period, end of story, whether he became the champion or not.”
This, of course, forces us to wonder about one of White’s other persistent claims about Ngannou, which is that he would have made more money if he’d accepted the UFC’s offer back in 2022 rather than waiting out his contract so he could compete as a boxer while also signing with the PFL.
“Francis is all about the money,” White said at last week’s Power Slap press conference. “Francis left because he knew if he fought Jon Jones and didn’t win, it would hurt his chances at making the money he wanted to make. But realistically his deal was bigger here (in the UFC).”
So, just to be clear, White’s saying that he didn’t like Ngannou and didn’t want him in the UFC — even as the reigning heavyweight champion. He’s also saying that he offered Ngannou a ton of money to stay in the UFC. Like, more money than Ngannou made for boxing matches against Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, a couple guys who typically don’t get out of bed for less than seven or eight figures.
In other words, White would like us to believe that he hated Ngannou so much, he wanted to make him the highest paid UFC fighter of all time. He also wants us to believe that Ngannou rejected that offer because he was scared to lose a fight to Jon Jones. So scared, in fact, that he decided to compete in his first ever boxing match against an undefeated heavyweight boxing champion instead.
In case you couldn’t already tell, I don’t buy any of this. Not the claims about money and definitely not the part about wanting to cut Ngannou for being a bad person. If you’ve been paying any attention at all over the past couple decades, you know that being a bad person doesn’t get you cut from the UFC. Not if you win fights and draw eyeballs, anyway.
And Ngannou? If he’s secretly some dastardly villain in real life then he’s doing a better job of hiding it than any pro fighter has ever done. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about him — coaches, fellow fighters, journalists who’ve spent time with him — all say he’s just as good a human as he appears to be. We have police reports and cell phone videos and body cam footage documenting the bad acts of a lot of other people in the UFC, White included, but nothing of the kind on Ngannou. Whatever Ngannou supposedly knows about hiding all evidence of his low moral character, there’s a lot of people on the UFC roster who would benefit from a lesson.
Clearly, White has some weird thing about Ngannou. Maybe something about a fighter who stands up for himself and demands to be paid what he thinks he’s worth just rubs him the wrong way. And the fact that Ngannou’s bet on himself seems to have paid off, maybe that bothers White even more.
He insists it doesn’t, of course. He scoffed at Ngannou’s claim that White had been “praying for (his) downfall,” then turned right around and, minutes later, referred to it as a “great night” when “Stipe beat the sh*t out of him” in a unanimous decision win at UFC 220. (No mention of the rematch at UFC 260, which Ngannou won by knockout.)
After all this time, I think we know what it takes to become a bad guy in White’s eyes. All you have to do is ask for more of the money that you’re helping to generate for the UFC and then refuse to take less.
Current UFC heavyweight champ Jon Jones has also gotten on the wrong side of White this way. White’s insistence that Ngannou is just scared to fight Jones was completely reversed back when it was Jones asking for more money. Then he re-upped with the UFC and now he’s the good guy again. For now.
What’s really wild is that, in so many ways, Ngannou is a fight promoter’s dream. He has an incredible personal story of triumph and resilience in the face of unimaginable hardship. He risked his life multiple times so he could chase a dream, then he made the dream come true. He’s a knockout artist with an exciting style. He manages to be both a terrifying destroyer of worlds inside the cage while remaining a cuddly teddy bear outside of it. So yeah, of course you wouldn’t want a guy like that as your champion.
White has gotten very used to having things his way. Especially within the closed ecosystem of the UFC, he gets to reshape the world to his liking. He decides on a narrative, repeats it often enough, and it becomes reality. What seems to upset him is anyone who would challenge that reality, which is exactly what Ngannou has done.
He left on his own terms. He left with the UFC heavyweight title. He showed that a fighter could stand up for himself and actually get somewhere. This is his great crime. If the punishment for it is the wrath of White, well, I guess he’ll just have to find some way to live with that.
