With Texas now having somewhat controversially announced that it’s going to open up 100% for business, Dana White now appears to be all-in on hosting the UFC’s first full-arena event there since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
“I want to go to Texas ASAP,” White told reporters yesterday, just days before UFC 259. “I’ll go in the next two, three weeks. I’m ready to roll.
“We’ll be first, we’ll open this thing up, we’ll sell it out and be on our way.”
In fact, White is so eager that there’s already talk that he could shift the UFC 260 event on March 27th, headlined by a heavyweight title fight between Stipe Miocic and Francis Ngannou, to Texas.
“I’d move this one (UFC 259) if we could. I told everybody when this opened up that I would be first and we would go first. And we will.”
The UFC were also first to start hosting fan-free events following the covid-19 shutdown last year and were largely successful in making that a safe environment.
However, the fact that Texas is opening up and ditching it’s mask requirements has raised eyebrows in some quarters as it’s one of the lowest ranked states in terms of vaccine uptake, and meanwhile it’s ranked as having the 8th highest infection rate per capita in the country over the past week.
So, selling out an arena in Texas at this stage could still prove to be a super-spreader event, but that doesn’t appear to be concerning White, who has already been speaking to cities to find out who would be willing to host a UFC show there.
“Dallas said no and I’m working on Houston. So (we’ll) see if we can get Houston done.”
