UFC president Dana White revealed that “all hell broke loose” backstage only minutes before the UFC 279 press conference was due to take place. White hastily addressed the media after abruptly cancelling the event, although the scheduled fights for Saturday night will still take place.
Rather than allowing all fighters on the main card to address the media, White settled on a “two by two” approach. After Kevin Holland and Daniel Rodriguez addressed a few questions, White shut the entire event down.
Dana White: Backstage Brawl Led to Cancellation of UFC 279 Press Conference
Nate Diaz and Khamzat Chimaev’s teams were central to the backstage fracas. “The Diaz camp showed up with 57 people. Khamzat’s team had 30-something people. Then you had multiple guys going on back here. It was crazy. It was absolutely nuts back here.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where this whole press conference was headed. We come here with a skeleton crew for the press conferences. There aren’t nearly as many people as there are for the ceremonial weigh-ins. We’ll have tons of security, Metro, it’s a totally different ball game. This will never happen again.” Ariel Helwani shared a detailed version of events on Instagram.
“Before going out, behind the curtain is Khamzat Chimaev and his team, and Kevin Holland and his team, they’ve been exchanging some words as of late. And they started to exchange some words, and they got very close to each other, and were kind of pushing each other and whatnot. No real physical activity so to speak in terms of serious kicks, punches landed, but there was definitely some physicality, if you will.
Tiki Ghosn, longtime MMA fighter turned MMA manager, happened to be back there, got in between them and broke it up. There was hardly any security, few police officers, but way too many people, way too many team members and fiery fighters. He was actually the guy, as Dana White said in his press scrum, who broke the whole thing up.
Then Nate and his team show up, and as the whole thing between Holland and Chimaev dies down, they see Tiki standing next to Chimaev. Nate and his team go a long way with Tiki and are kinda confused about that. Unhappy about that. Words are exchanged, things exchanged back and forth.
All of a sudden, water bottles are being thrown, people are upset about where Tiki was standing, things that are being said back and forth, so then the whole thing gets out of hand. Water bottles are being thrown, I believe Tiki was hit by a water bottle or two but not seriously hurt. After that whole thing escalated, everybody was finally pulled apart and they decided to cancel the press conference.”
