“I caught Dana White’s bluff,” Georges St Pierre talks about his rift with UFC boss while wanting to fight Oscar De La Hoya
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Georges St Pierre and Dana White
September 11 was supposed to be the day UFC legend Georges St Pierre was supposed to start a new venture in the sport of boxing. He was going to fight Oscar De La Hoya in a boxing match until UFC President Dana White was not welcoming of it.
Former UFC two-division champion, Georges St Pierre, though stopped fighting inside the octagon has been very active in the gyms. After MMA, he was on his pursuit to fight boxing legend, Oscar De La Hoya but Dana White did not allow GSP to do so. So Oscar will instead fight another UFC legend, Vitor Belfort on Sep. 11. St Pierre went on MMA Fighting’s show MMA Hour where Ariel Helwani asked him about the fight. They discussed how Dana played an important role for GSP to not fight.
“I thought it would be a fun thing to do,” St-Pierre told host Ariel Helwani. “My career to prove that I’m the strongest man in the world in the sport of mixed martial arts is done. I’m 40 years old. But to do something different, something that could be fun and very motivating for me, and plus on top of that a lot of money would’ve been given to charity, against a legend in the sport like Oscar De La Hoya, I think I would’ve done it.”
“I even called [former UFC owner] Lorenzo [Fertitta] to try to convince Dana,” St-Pierre said. “Lorenzo liked the idea, but Dana did not want it. I knew he hates Oscar but I said to him, ‘Listen, I’m going to make Oscar look bad because I’m in great shape. I’ve been staying in great shape the whole time and I’m going to do a full boxing training camp with Freddie Roach and his world champions there, so I’ll be very well prepared.’”
Why Dana White didn’t allow Georges St Pierre?
“And at first he refused,” St-Pierre continued. “Then he thought about it but he came back with the argument that, oh, no, it’s not because he thinks Oscar is going to win; he thinks it’s because he doesn’t like the fact that Triller takes me and makes money off my back while I’m still under contract with UFC. So what Dana says — listen to this — then he came back and he asked me if I wanted to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov.
“And I told Dana, I said, ‘That’s very strange. Why didn’t you want to do the fight when we asked you a few years ago? Why is it now?’ He said, ‘Yeah, because Khabib was not retired and he was not the same guy that he was. Now it all makes sense.’ So I didn’t want to, but I was curious to see what would’ve happened, so I said to him, ‘I’m going to think about it,’ and I waited.”
How Dana White bluffed to Georges St Pierre
“Dana White had a lot of heat for not letting me fight from the media, so he asked me to fight Khabib because he was expecting a negative answer from me,” St-Pierre said. “So he would’ve had a good argument, a good reason, saying to the media, ‘Georges refused to fight for us, so I’m not going to let him fight for someone else.’ So that was the reason I waited to see what happened, and turns out that I was right, I believe. So Khabib refused, but I didn’t mean that I was going to say yes.”
“I caught Dana White’s bluff. That’s what happened,” St-Pierre later added. “Not that it was a bluff, but the main reason why he wanted to do it was because of the heat that he received from the media. And the fact that also maybe he wanted to make extra money, try a home run because he knew Khabib and I were retired.”
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Prateek Athanur
(2974 Articles Published)