Miami, FL — UFC CEO Dana White was bullish on the prospects of lightweight Dustin Poirier following a stunning knockout of Benoit Saint-Denis at UFC 299 on Saturday.
Poirier-BSD was scheduled as a five-round co-main event on the PPV card, but as it turned out the full 25 minutes weren’t needed. After a bumpy road getting to fight night that included Poirier briefly claiming the fight was off, White suggested the Fight of the Night war with a game opponent was how legends are made.
“The fight that he took tonight with Benoit, everybody when the talk first started and everybody was like ‘ooh this is a bad fight for Poirier, blah blah blah blah blah’ and then Poirier came out and said ‘you know what, I didn’t sign’ — this is the sh*t that makes you a f*cking legend,” White exclaimed during the event’s post-fight press conference, speaking with media outlets including Cageside Press. “These are legendary fights. When you go in and face a guy who is a savage and looks like you can’t win this fight, or people think you can’t win this fight and then you go in and do it in spectacular fashion the way that he did tonight.”
“A lot of these fighters, you’ve heard it many times in the past, ‘they want me to lose,’ or ‘they’re trying to me to lose.’ I heard some nutty sh*t the other day from somebody that I won’t even mention. We don’t determine whether you lose or whether you win. You do. What we try to do is put on the best matchmaked fight that we can possibly do. And that’s why big stars are built in the UFC and legendary fights happen every weekend.”
As far as the title picture is concerned, Dana White replied to a follow-up question by saying that “his [Poirier’s] stock again goes through the roof. At his age, all the things he’s accomplished, all the things he’s done. Look at what he did tonight.”
White singled out the fan reaction at the Kaseya Center in Miami during the co-main event, which was undeniably boisterous, and suggested that “Poirier went to a whole ‘nother level tonight with this fight.”
Watch the full UFC 299 post-fight press conference with Dana White above.
