John Oliver “not mad” at Dana White for stealing UFSea idea, but has some advice for the UFC president

TV host John Oliver has responded to UFC president Dana White trademarking the ‘UFSea’ term that started the war of words between the two.

A few weeks ago, Oliver criticized the Ultimate Fighting Championship and White for putting on events in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis. He also focused specifically on UFC’s Fight Island idea, proceeding to suggest UFSea as a more imaginative term for the plan.

White then noted to the media that he was stealing Oliver’s idea and not giving him a piece of the pie, and as you can probably imagine, there was a further retort from the Last Week Tonight host.

“First, Dana White intentionally forgetting my name is a truly excellent neg, or rather, it would be if he weren’t only number 83 on GQ’s list of the 100 most powerful bald men in the world from 2013,” Oliver said (transcript via MMA Fighting). “Now that is a neg right there, Dana. You got beat by Jason Alexander. You got Costanzaed!

“More importantly, I’m not remotely mad here,” Oliver continued. “I want you to use that name. In fact, I think you should let us rename all of your events, because frankly, you’re not very good at it. Take UFC 249, it’s just your logo plus a number. Where’s the pizzaz there? How about this, UFC: Knuckle Opera? Or Dust Up at the Beef Factory? Or Large Hamboy Collider? It’s better, right? Who doesn’t want to see some hamboys collide right now? Honestly, even the name Dana White could use little punch up. It doesn’t sound like the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, it sounds like the third best real estate agent in Sacramento or a video where a white woman calls the cops on a black family for smiling too hard.”

“I am not mad at Tug Slabmeat for stealing our idea for ‘UFSea,’” Oliver continued. “We may not even be the first person he stole them from. He only filed for the ‘Fight Island’ trademark a week after a TMZ reporter suggested to him he call it that. In fact, the only thing that he’s done here that annoyed me was accusing us of using ‘selective facts,’ because facts are to me what other peoples’ ideas are to Dana White: something I’m very passionate about.”

John Oliver concluded by responding to Dana White’s complaint that his initial comments about the UFC only used “selective facts.”

“What apparently upset him was that in our piece we pointed out that three people, a UFC fighter and his two cornermen, all tested positive for coronavirus before a recent event, underscoring the fact that it seems impossible to return to sports completely without risk right now. White responded on Twitter to say ‘we had three events, not one,’ which is completely irrelevant, and that those three positives came from 1,100 tests, which does initially seem to minimize it – until you learn that all those tests were administered to just 300 people. Basically, Dana was quoting a larger number to make the positive results look less significant, which seems like, I don’t know, a selective fact.”

What do you think of this back and forth between John Oliver and Dana White?