In the wake of the troubling video of Dana White and his wife Anne slapping each other during an argument at a club in Cabo, Mexico on New Years Eve, TBS has delayed White’s Power Slap League TV show that was originally scheduled to air on Wednesday, January 11th by a week.
There’s been talk of whether the NYE incident could even threaten White’s position in the UFC, but for now the already-controversial Power Slap promotion had seemed like an obvious target to be struck down by the controversy.
When it first emerged that the show had been pulled from it’s original air date yesterday there was suggestions that TBS were on the verge of pulling the plug on it altogether, but though that potentially could still be an option depending on how things go, for now the channel’s spokesperson Jordi Arancio confirmed that it had only been pushed back until January 18th.
TBS had already committed to eight 1-hour episodes of White’s slap-fighting show, which sees two competitors take turns to slap each other in the face until one can’t continue.
Needless to say the concept has been highly criticized, particularly due to the fact that a competitor is not allowed to defend themselves while being slapped, leading to concerns over potential brain injuries, but nonetheless after White threw his weight behind it the Nevada Athletic Commission voted to regulate it.
Meanwhile, there’s increasing pressure on White to face repercussions for the incident in Cabo that saw him first being slapped by his wife before retaliating with a slap of his own, and while the likes of the UFC, Endeavor and ESPN have been hesitant to speak out on the matter, ESPN pundit Stephen A. Smith has suggested that the UFC president needs to punish himself for his actions, as he’d done to other fighters in a similar situation in the past.
“You do not put your hands on a woman if you’re a man,” Smith said on ‘First Take’. “Dana White knows that. He has spoken out against men who have put their hands on women before and whatever punishment you would exact in these circumstances to somebody else is what he should apply to himself.”
White publicly apologized in an interview with TMZ at the same time as the original story first broke, but has remained silent since.
