Dana White has revealed that he experienced the type of treatment Oscar De La Hoya recently accused him of for the Ryan Garcia-Conor Benn fight, recalling how Vince McMahon allegedly left him scrambling for tickets before Ronda Rousey’s WWE in-ring debut.
Speaking on Tuesday after Week 9 of Dana White’s Contender Series, a UFC auditioning platform for MMA prospects, White rejected De La Hoya’s accusation that he and Zuffa Boxing intended to embarrass the Golden Boy Promotions founder at the Garcia-Benn event.
White acknowledged that his dislike for De La Hoya is well known but insisted he would never deliberately invite an enemy to an event only to humiliate them once they arrived.
What Happened Between Dana White and Vince McMahon?
Instead, White pointed to an experience he said he had in New Orleans in 2018. According to the UFC CEO, McMahon did essentially what De La Hoya feared would happen to him during Ronda Rousey’s WWE debut, leaving White without his expected tickets and ultimately putting him in the bleachers.
“It happened to me,” White said. “Vince McMahon did it to me for Ronda’s first wrestling match.”
He said De La Hoya knew he had tickets and knew where he was supposed to sit, making the situation fundamentally different from White’s account of arriving in New Orleans without tickets.
“Oscar knew he had tickets,” White said. “Oscar knew where he was sitting. Oscar was coming in the back like all the celebrities do to the celebrity VIP area, and he knew all of that.”
For White, the experience with McMahon gave him a personal example of the kind of treatment he says he would never intentionally do to any of his personal enemies.
White’s foray into Zuffa Boxing is proving to rub promoters the wrong way, and while neither White nor De La Hoya appears interested in burying the hatchet, White is adamant that he would never stoop to such an immature level of sabotage.
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