White keeping UFC 249 location secret so 'creepy people' don't attack it
UFC president Dana White is still refusing to reveal the location of UFC 249 - otherwise, he said, people would try to stop the event from happening.
"There's a lot of creepy people out there, and when they find out the location, they start attacking the location and making phone calls," White told ESPN's Brett Okamoto on Monday. "This keeps the creeps at bay."
Despite several hurdles amid the coronavirus pandemic, the promotion is moving forward with its April 18 pay-per-view card. Tony Ferguson will meet Justin Gaethje for the interim lightweight title in the main event.
Since UFC 249 was uprooted from its original location of Brooklyn, one of the biggest stories surrounding the event has been where it'll take place. When White announced Ferguson-Gaethje on Monday, he joked that the location would be "somewhere on Earth."
White said not even the athletes on the UFC 249 card will know where they'll be competing.
"We're gonna get the fighters somewhere and we're gonna bring them to this location," White said. "They won't know where they're headed to."
The UFC has faced criticism for trying to continue operations during the pandemic, but White said he believes doing so serves as a solution. He said everyone besides himself and WWE's Vince McMahon is "afraid to be first" in returning to normal procedures.
"Right now, we need leadership," he said. "We need people that are gonna go out and find solutions. Hiding in your house is not an answer. I get it, we have to do it. We followed everything that the CDC has said. But at what point do you start to get back to normal? You keep people in their houses for too long with no entertainment, people are gonna start losing their minds. We need to start figuring out solutions, and that's what we're doing."
White said fighters, staff, and event personnel will have access to "the best medical attention, the best doctors, the best treatment you can possibly get." He said the promotion plans to "screen" them but did not explicitly say whether or not they'd be tested for COVID-19.
"We're gonna do everything that we can possibly do to make sure that we have healthy people," White said.