After Aljamain Sterling successfully retained the bantamweight title with a decision victory over Petr Yan at UFC 273 on Saturday night, Dana White told reporters that he thought it was the wrong decision and Yan should have won.
Now Sterling has had a chance to respond to that and he makes it clear there’s no love lost between the two.
“Dana’s always going to be throwing dirt on my name, that’s just what he does,” Sterling told BJPenn.com. “I think he has Yan rated so highly, he’s such a dangerous guy, to have the grappler do that to him, he was really, really shocked. Especially after the first fight, because he probably thought I had no chance in hell of winning that fight either.”
“Sucks to be him right now in the sense of you really wrote me off after everything you have seen that I’ve done in this sport, in his organization, it’s a slap in the face but at the end of the day, it doesn’t bother me. I think it bothers him more, clearly because he doesn’t know how to judge a fight, which it shows. I think he maybe let his emotions get ahead of him and that’s probably it. He was probably really invested in Yan winning that fight and I threw a monkey wrench into their plans.”
Nevertheless, despite his tensions with White on a business level, he says they still remain cordial when they do meet.
“It’s happened in the past, more so the business aspect of things. When it comes to outside of the Octagon, whenever we have talked it is super cordial, I’m super polite, he’s super polite and he’s always nice to me. We have always had good conversations but when it comes to the fights he doesn’t really like grapplers like that, unless you are Khabib.”
