UFC President Dana White has fired back at Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya.
During the last few weeks, White was very critical of De La Hoya, who staged the first Golden Boy MMA pay-per-view event - which was headlined by a trilogy bout between UFC Hall of Famers Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz.
Ortiz, who lost their two prior meetings scored a brutal first round knockout over the near 50-year-old Liddell, who been out of the cage since 2010.
In the aftermath, White erupted on De La Hoya - calling the former six division champion a "coke head" and a "junkie."
White, who considers Liddell a close friend, was furious with De La Hoya's decision put him back in the cage.
But De La Hoya has no intention of stopping. He plans to continue the Golden Boy MMA brand with more events.
"First of all, what I said, not about him personally, just about the business, is that fighters come up to me and say 'we don't get paid enough, UFC just sold for four billion dollars and we're struggling.' Look I'm not attacking his persona, I'm not attacking him personally. If he wants to attack me personally for what happened 15 years ago... I've made myself better and done the work to make myself the person I am today," De La Hoya told First Take.
"I work hard to build my business and take care of my fighters, are you doing the same? Why are so many fighters complaining? I'm getting to a point where I was going to promote one event, Tito Ortiz vs Chuck Liddell. Why are they still fighting at this age? Because Dana White doesn't pay them enough.
"There are 40-50 UFC fighters calling me and I respect their contracts but once those fighters are free agents I'm going to take those calls. I'm going to compete with Dana White."
But White has fired back.
He said De La Hoya was a liar and circulating false figures and fake news.
White challenged De La Hoya to a head to head debate, on any television network, and he wants both of them to go through drug testing.
“Oscar De La Hoya is a liar. He has no facts. Listen, if Oscar wants to, we can get someone from the pay-per-view industry, or however he wants to do it, we can sit down with numbers. Listen, the reality of it is he doesn’t know anything about his business. He just did an interview with the kid at TSN in Canada the other day, he didn’t know what anybody was paid. He showed up to his own event at the press conference and didn’t know any of the fighters’ names. And what’s even crazier, he didn’t even write ’em down. Put ’em on a piece of paper, you idiot! Right, he didn’t even write ’em down on a piece of paper," White said to ESPN.com.
“And the guy is an absolute liar. Listen, we can sit down and we can do this on TV. We can go head-to-head. We can also take drug tests if he wants to do that to. I’m ready to go. Let’s go, Oscar, you idiot. Let’s do it, idiot. Come on, any show you want to and I want to hear you stumble and bumble and mumble through.
"You know, he doesn’t run the business, he knows nothing about the business, he knows nothing about the sport, and he’s not very bright, so let’s do it. Any day of the week, let’s do it. And let’s do drug tests too, I wanna do that too.”
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