“Oh, I’m so pumped for this fight. So pumped.”
Dana White is on the phone from Los Angeles, a couple hours before boarding his late-night flight to New York City for UFC 230. Weigh-ins and staredowns are forthcoming at Madison Square Garden, but the lead-up to Saturday’s main event—reigning champion Daniel Cormier vs. knockout artist/meme enthusiast Derrick Lewis for the heavyweight belt—has been cordial and uneventful, save for Lewis’s half-baked insistence that Cormier disrespected fried chicken.
Certainly, there has been none of the same venom spewed prior to UFC 229 in Las Vegas, where Khabib Nurmagomedov defended his lightweight title by submitting Conor McGregor before defending his honor by leaping into the crowd to attack one of McGregor’s cronies.