"Nope. Now I don't have to hear about him anymore. I like it.... He has star power? Nobody cares. Do you realize this is something that's been created by the mixed martial arts media? Do you know how many people watched his fight the other night? 400,000 people watched it. The guy has absolutely no star power. They sold no tickets to that fight, either.... Here's the problem, the guy loses and gets to fight one of these guys? I've been saying for years this guy isn't all that. He's not great. Everybody's talking about how great this guy is, no he's not. Now he should deserve to come into the UFC and fight the best? No way!... The guys who fight in the UFC are fighting the very best three times a year. This guy hasn't fought anybody since 2005. The media created him and hyped him up. Not me. What do you want me to say? This is what I've been saying?"
-- Well, that's that. UFC President Dana White tells ESPNRadio1100 (via CageWriter.com) that he's no longer in the hunt for the elusive former Pride FC heavyweight champion, Fedor Emelianenko, after he sustained basically his first loss in a decade of competition last weekend. Emelianenko, who has famously shunned White's repeated attempts to join the UFC fray, got trapped in a Fabricio Werdum triangle choke while competing under the Strikeforce/M-1 banner, losing convincingly to a UFC castoff (Werdum was 2-2 inside the eight-walled cage). It appears that Emelianenko lost more than his aura of invincibility on June 26 -- he may have missed his chance to seal his legacy and go down as the best ever with a successful, high-profile run with the mixed martial arts marketing machine. Having said all of that, he still may go down as the best ever. And he probably doesn't really care one way or the other what fans, or Dana White, think about his career choices. Care to predict who'll have the last laugh in this never-ending saga?
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