Yesterday UFC president Dana White hosted a special fan Q&A on the set of The Ultimate Fighter Season 17 which just started filming in Las Vegas, and we’ve got the full video for you below which included an appearance by the show’s team coaches Jon Jones and Chael Sonnen.
We’ll cover some of the juicier news that emerged from this in future posts, but for now it’s interesting to note how well Jones and Sonnen appeared to be getting along during this Q&A.
A lot of the appeal of this coming season of TUF is down to the apparent animosity between these two and the promise of Sonnen getting under the champion’s skin with his unique trash-talking ways, but on this evidence they looked more like old pals than mortal enemies.
That could be bad news for the UFC who need this season to be a home run after the dismal performance of the last two outings on FX.
In some ways it reminds me of TUF 13 on Spike TV which featured Brock Lesnar and Junior Dos Santos as coaches. As the sport’s biggest star at the time Lesnar should have been a ratings winner, but it quickly emerged that there was no real animosity or drama between the two fighters and the former pro-wrestler was being surprisingly cool, calm and collected and the audience figures quickly took a nosedive and never fully recovered.
It’s early days of course – the video was taken on only the second day of filming – and Sonnen is savvy enough to know that the more conflict he can generate the more PPV’s he’ll sell for their eventual fight, but on the other hand Jones might just be hoping to coast through the season without getting on the wrong side of his opponent’s notoriously sharp tongue.
Check out the full Q&A below courtesy of MetroPCS.
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