The event promoters are certainly setting expectations high. “We are running the most historic sporting event in history,” UFC promoter and CEO Dana White told TIME. The problem here is that this fight card, absent the White House backdrop, won’t be a particularly big or impressive card by the standards of the most historic or any month scheduled for next month. “Dignity” is not a word typically associated with promoting fighting; still.
On Thursday, multihyphenate Marco Rubio compared the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to landing on the moon, making a hard-to-follow point about the distinctly American nature of the company. As absurd as this may be in general terms, it is much more specific.
The UFC, which was founded largely to showcase the jiu-jitsu skills of the Brazilians, was not the first MMA promotion. It was also not the first MMA promotion, founded in 1993. (That honor goes to Pancrase, which itself was not even the first Japanese MMA promotion to ask “What if pro wrestling were real?”) White did not, as Rubio claimed, introduce the ideas of rules and weight classes into the sport. It didn’t make any sense.
Rubio, as Secretary of State, was in Washington, DC with White at an event to sign what was called a Memorandum of Understanding for some reason, the purpose of which was to bring the unique qualities of the UFC into the administration’s sports diplomacy. Perhaps Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, who has deep ties to UFC fighters the UFC has long insisted not extend to the UFC under contract to, will play a role.
Frankly, White is an innovator. His Power Slap Show, which premiered in January 2023 – the same month TMZ published a video of him publicly slapping his wife – promotes a real and distinctly American sport that simply involves people attempting to convince each other.
Now, he’s disrupting the steamy spot by claiming he expects “Super Bowl type numbers” for Sunday’s event. (Netflix, which claims its recent Ronda Rousey fight was the most-watched MMA event ever, peaked at 11.6 million U.S. viewers — less than 10 percent of the most recent Super Bowl’s average audience.)
Certainly no expense has been spared for this apparently most historic event in history. Looking out over the White House lawn, you’d be forgiven for thinking that organizers literally transported the contents of a Meta-branded warehouse from Las Vegas and dumped it there.
If UFC Freedom 250 may not be watched by every person in America, that may be because, for a card featuring fighters entering the Oval Office, it’s not exactly thrilling. A generous descriptor would be… ok. In the main event, undefeated 155-pound champion Ilya Topuria will take on interim 155-pound champion Justin Gaethje, who has been a reliably entertaining fighter for years. There will also be an interim heavyweight title bout and several other bouts, almost all of them involving ranked fighters (and none of them involving women). Probably relatively few people who are not familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of various betting apps will be extremely excited by the offerings, but there are still plenty of people, and it should be a solid night of action.
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