There are times when I feel the UFC has their business as organized and premeditated as possible, and then there are times when they seem to completely miss the point.
"It starts to get to the point where I'm like, 'I guess if everybody wants to see this fight, maybe we make this fight,’” he said. These are the words of a guy who would stare long and hard at a falling anvil before deciding to move out of the way.
There’s a fairly straightforward reason why audiences are rabid about the fight: it represents one of the very few times in the sport’s history where two athletes have been so uniformly dominant that the promise of one finally appearing human is an exciting prospect. The minute St. Pierre or Silva lose -- from the UFC’s perspective, probably the most opportune time to make the fight -- all of that anticipation goes out the window. As enjoyable as it was to see Chuck Liddell and Wanderlei Silva in 2007, that match would’ve blown synapses in 2005. Timing is everything.
It’s not necessarily that White is oblivious to this, but that he’s suspicious of sacrificing one pound-for-pound guy’s reputation for the sake of a one-night payoff. (Though it’d be a huge one-night payoff.) That’s sensible, but it’s also the kind of bureaucratic crap that’s prevented boxing from making a lot of historic bouts over the past 30 years. It’s bad enough we’re absent some big fights because of conflicting promotions: if two fighters are under the same employer, there’s no reason not to capitalize on it.