In April 2013, UFC President Dana White was ready to turn away the President of the United States.
“We couldn’t seat Obama,” White told Bloomberg.com ahead of UFC 159. “He’d have to sit on my lap.”
That the light heavyweight championship clash between then champ Jon Jones and Chael Sonnen still had tickets available for sale didn’t dissuade White from a hypothetical rebuff of POTUS. The event selling 15,227 tickets for a $2.7 million live gate two years after UFC 111 sold 17,000 for $4 million at the same Prudential Center venue in Newark, New Jersey didn’t matter too much after the fact, either.