An ongoing feud between promotors Dana White and Oscar De La Hoya has now escalated with White going on ESPN to lambast the boxing legend and Golden Boy owner, while De La Hoya has upped the ante even further by issuing an offer to fight his rival.
De La Hoya has recently claimed that the UFC are underpaying their fighters, and that sent White on the warpath during an interview on ESPN’s First Take show yesterday.
“It’s one thing to sit around with your friends and lie. It’s another thing to go on ESPN and lie,” White said of a recent appearance on the channel by De La Hoya. “So here are the facts. I have paid Chuck Liddell more money over the years not to fight in the last seven years than he paid him to fight Tito Ortiz. That’s a fact, number one. From 2011 to 2017, when I asked him to retire, we paid him around $400,000 a year to not fight.”
By contrast, De La Hoya paid Liddell $250,000 to come out of retirment and fight Tito Ortiz. Liddell was also guaranteed to get a cut of the pay-per-view revenue, but given that the event ended up doing a dismal 30,000 buys rather than the 500,000 that had initially been touted, that proved to be a financial flop.
White also came armed with other interesting financial facts, including the UFC having had nine events in their history that have done over one million pay-per-view buys, from which fighters earned a total of $133 million, $84 million of which went to the main event fighters and $27.4 million to the co-main event stars and $21.6 million to the remainder of the cards.
Meanwhile, De La Hoya took to Luke Thomas’ show on Sirius XM and called him out for a boxing match next year.
“Let’s do this under Canelo Cinco de Mayo,” De La Hoya stated. “I’ll even give you five months so you can get off the juice and then we can, you know, get in great shape and then we go three rounds, and then, ’m going to give you what, a 50-pound advantage? That’s okay, I can take you on. Let’s do it.”
