Dana White was forced to cancel the UFC 279 press conference following a number of backstage altercations.
Khamzat Chimaev and Nate Diaz were due to address the media for the last time before their fight this weekend, which is set to be Diaz's final bout with the promotion. But Chimaev sparked a brawl involving up to 100 people when he kicked fellow fighter Kevin Holland.
There was at least one further altercation between Chimaev's team and Diaz's entourage which saw bottles thrown. White later revealed four of the six fighters due to speak at the press conference were involved. "All hell broke loose," he said after the incident. "We stopped it, but we didn’t do a good job of not letting it happen.
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“Yeah [it was Khamzat Chimaev and Kevin Holland that started it]. There were multiple things going on at the same time. It wasn’t just one thing that erupted and it happened. There were multiple things going on at the same time.
"So there was security over there, there was no security over there. There was no security over there cause everybody was dealing with the other thing and once it all started erupting, it was just a complete s*** show."
Holland later tweeted that he "didn't feel a thing" after being kicked by Chimaev while White insisted the UFC would not be handing out fines. "This is what we do," he added. "This is the business that we’re in. This is the fight business. These things happen. What we’ll do is we look at how this happened today, why were we unprepared for this, why we were not able to manage this backstage better than we did, and we’ll be better next time.
“When you know that you have guys that don’t like each other, you make sure that they’re isolated, you have plenty of security around. You know how Nate and Khamzat are, they could have some words and we have enough people here to deal with it.
"What we didn’t have enough people for was everybody to start fighting. When everybody starts fighting and there was more than just fighting going on that security was dealing with. We weren’t prepared.”
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