Dana White has spent fight week promoting UFC 332, and for a while he appeared to be promoting the wrong fighter. With Natalia Silva ranked number one at women's flyweight and Wang Cong only sixth, fans had questioned why the Chinese contender had been handed Saturday's shot at the vacant title in Salt Lake City. Asked to explain in an interview with the website MMA Fighting, the UFC chief executive ran through her record. "If you look at what she's done in her body of work. She's 10-1," White said. "I was just saying, she beat Rose Namajunas, she beat Andrade, she beat Grasso. And she beat Valentina Shevchenko in a kickboxing match." Two of those claims stand up: Wang is 10-1 and did outpoint Shevchenko at Kunlun Fight, a Chinese kickboxing promotion, in 2015. The other three do not. Namajunas, Jessica Andrade and Alexa Grasso, all former UFC champions, are the last three victims of Silva, the very woman Wang will face, while Wang's own UFC wins include Tracy Cortez and Ariane da Silva. "I guess this is what happens when you don't follow your own product anymore?" Ariel Helwani, one of MMA's best-known journalists, wrote on social media. "It's just laughably sad," sportscaster Ben Davis added.
Thursday's pre-fight press conference at the Delta Center offered White a chance to reset. When the question came up again, he avoided repeating the mistake but offered little else. "We're always trying to find out who the best is. That's what we care about," he said. "In making this fight, Wang was the decision we made. Natalia obviously on a 14-fight win streak, we'll see." Then came a fresh embarrassment. Ateba Gautier, the 24-year-old Cameroonian middleweight who opens the main card against Roman Kopylov, answered a reporter's question in French, the language of his hometown of Douala, and nobody in the room translated it. The next question came in English, and Gautier answered it in English. "Is he human, bro?" he asked of his Russian opponent. White went looking for an interpreter anyway, before conceding that the promotion had been caught short. "We got f***ed outta that one," he admitted. "We don't have a translator here for him. Sorry." Gautier, riding a 10-fight winning streak, smiled through it all. Fans online were less forgiving. They pointed out that he had just spoken English, that English and French are both official languages in Cameroon, and asked how the sport's biggest promotion could not find a single French speaker.
