Dana White on UFC 300: 'It’s Expected to Break Every Record at the T-Mobile Arena'

Dana White has high expectations for the upcoming UFC 300 card, which goes down at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on April 13.

With the promotion’s early struggles, White had imagined he would be in his 70s by the time UFC 100 came around. However, things took off and the Ultimate Fighting Championship emerged as an industry leader, hosting cards almost every weekend with its 300th event on the horizon.

“I’ll tell you a story, so me and Lorenzo [Fertitta] are at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City when we first started putting on these events,” White told TNT Sports. “And we’re walking down home and there are these two old men and they’re fighting, screaming at each other in the hallway. Lorenzo was like, ‘That’s gonna be me and you at UFC 100.’ This is UFC 31 or something, 100 seemed like it was gonna be – we’re doing five events a year – so we were figuring we’d be in our seventies when UFC 100 would come. Obviously, thing took off and we’re doing 44 events a year so 100 came quick and here I am talking about 300.”

White has made an effort to make the card one of the deepest in promotion history. During the interview, the UFC CEO pulled up a list detailing the fighters’ statistics for the card. According to White, UFC 300 is expected to break every record at the T-Mobile Arena with a $15 million gate.

“This time we’re looking at, ‘How do we make 300 different than 100, 200 and anything that we’ve ever done?’ What I wanted was, I wanted it to be, when the first prelim of the night starts, you have to be in front of your television. You can’t miss one fight on this card,” White said.

“So, when you look at 300 right, we have 12 current and former UFC champions or interim champions, seven pound-for-pound [ranked] fighters, almost every single fight features a ranked contender, 16 ranked fighters in total. And it’s expected to break every record at the T-Mobile Arena with a $15 million gate. So, UFC 300 is the greatest combat sports card ever assembled. I mean if you go back throughout history, even boxing. Look at a boxing card that has ever been done, even in the Don King days, when he was stacking these cards full. The first prelim of the night is [Deiveson] Figueiredo and Cody Garbrandt, then it’s just all the way up to the main event.”

The UFC has been having a great year so far in terms of pay-per-view success. UFC 297 at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, Canada in January became the highest arena gate in the country’s history. UFC 298 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, in February became the highest-grossing MMA event in California history. And Conor McGregor as half of the headliner. All three crossed the $15 million marker, two of which, UFC 229 ($17.7 million) and UFC 264 ($15.75 million), went down at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

After months of White teasing an unbelievable card, fans had mixed reactions to the announcement of the featured bouts at UFC 300. While the card undoubtedly runs deep with the likes of Jiri Prochazka and Aljamain Sterling fighting on the prelims, fans are not immensely impressed with the main and co-main events. Light heavyweight champ Alex Pereira defends his strap against Jamahal Hill in the headliner, and women’s strawweight champ Weili Zhang defends her title against Xiaonan Yan in the co-main. While these are high-caliber matchups, they failed to meet certain expectations after White at one point said that fans "couldn’t even handle the main event."