Not long after knocking out Darren Till at UFC London, Jorge Masvidal cut an interview on live TV short to confront Leon Edwards backstage, throwing punches in his direction.
The UFC serves as its own athletic commission of sorts for events, such as UFC London, in countries which do not have that level of US-style governing bodies for combat sports.
Given the precedent set by the Nevada State Athletic Commission for incidents involving the likes of Nate Diaz, Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov in the recent past, many believed Masvidal would be punished by the UFC for his transgressions.
But UFC President Dana White doesn’t blame either Masvidal or Edwards for the backstage fracas, instead levelling responsibility for that to his UFC staff.
“I do blame my staff. There’s never a scenario where you let guys walk up to each other like that backstage,” White told Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports [H/T MMA News]. “We have enough people backstage that, that shouldn’t happen, including security.
“I’m super disappointed in my whole crew for that one. These guys are fighters, they’re in the heat of the moment, he just won, he’s got the adrenaline pumping and [Leon Edwards] comes by plus Masvidal is ‘that guy’.
“For anybody backstage in my staff to let these guys walk up to each other is just ridiculous. As soon as he walked up the stage with his hands behind his back, 10 people from the UFC should have jumped in there. That stuff shouldn’t happen.”
White compared what happened at UFC London with the series of post-fight altercations with the aforementioned pair of Nurmagomedov and McGregor, saying he believes people overreact to those kind of scenes.
“It’s the fight business. Sometimes people overreact,” White said. “I thought a lot of people overreacted on the Conor [McGregor] and Khabib [Nurmagomedov] thing. We had that thing contained like that, we knew that was a possibility that could happen and we were ready for it. These things happen.
“It’s the fight business and our job is to make sure these things don’t happen on stage, behind the scenes, but sometimes it does. Sometimes things escalate and blow up.”
