A few days after Alexa Grasso somewhat controversially retained her flyweight title due to a split-draw result in her rematch against Valentina Shevchenko at UFC 293, Dana White has confirmed that he intends to go ahead with a trilogy encounter between the two next.
“They have to rematch,” White declared after last night’s Contender Series show in Las Vegas. “You have do the rematch. We will rematch them. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the fight that needs to happen.”
And the fact that Shevchenko has just confirmed that she needs to undergo surgery for a fractured thumb she suffered in the first round of the fight hasn’t altered White’s thinking on the matter, despite other leading contenders like Manon Fiorot and Erin Blanchfield calling for their chance to fight Grasso instead.
“We’re comfortable with where [Shevchenko] is at as far as her injury. We’re comfortable with it. She probably starts striking again in three months or a little less.”
The reason that White is so adamant that the fight has to be run back is due to the fact that one judge, Mike Bell, somehow scored the final round as 10-8 to Grasso, despite the fact that both fighters had their moments in that five-minute spell. That baffling lapse in judgement affected the entire outcome of the fight as if it had been 10-9 to Grasso instead then Shevchenko would have been won the fight and reclaimed the title.
“When I found out that one of the judges scored 10-8, I’m like, this guy should be f****** investigated for this,” Dana White said last night. “This is the craziest s*** I’ve ever seen in my life.
“I started to talk to people, I guess there’s a seminar tomorrow with the [Nevada] athletic commission on 10-8s, so hopefully they can get this cleared up. Especially in title [fights] — there’s so much at stake in a title fight. More than just money, show and win, and pay-per-view and championships and legacies — it’s just, you have to have the best of the best in title fights. So they’ve assured me that this guy isn’t a bad guy, he just f***** up and made a mistake, and it’s unfortunate, and there’s no way in hell that was a 10-8 round.”
“Unfortunately, you’ll probably never have the opportunity to have him sitting somewhere like this and ask him that question, because only he knows the answer to that question,” White continued. “Valentina gets dropped in [Round 2] — that’s not a 10-8 but the fifth round is a 10-8? It literally makes no sense.
“I get it, why the athletic commission wouldn’t want to put their guys out in front of the media and deal with the fans and all the bulls***, but you just don’t throw 10-8s around. The third round tonight [for Stephanie Luciano vs. Talita Alencar] was a 10-8. When there is an absolute ass-whooping and the fight could be stopped at any moment, and one fighter absolutely dominates from bell to bell, you can score it a 10-8. This whole [criteria of] domination, control, and all this other bulls***, it’s just the biggest crock of s*** of all-time for a 10-8. A 10-8 is an absolute ass-whooping, period.
“These people are human, they make mistakes, but this one’s total bulls***,” White continued. “For that to be a 10-8 round, there is no excuse for that. There is no excuse for that 10-8.”
