"How are you going to mention a guy who's been finished 4 or 5 times in the UFC?" - Ali Abdelaziz questions why Dana White included Conor McGregor in his top-5 fighters list
![Ali Abdelaziz and Dana White (left) [Image courtesy: @aliabdelaziz on Instagram] and Conor McGregor (right)](https://staticg.sportskeeda.com/editor/2022/08/1adf9-16608287185848-1920.jpg?w=500)
Dana White recently appeared on Actually Me, a series hosted by GQ Sports, where he answered a range of MMA questions, including who his personal top-five UFC fighters of all time are. White mentioned Anderson Silva, George St-Pierre, Ronda Rousey, Conor McGregor and Jon Jones.
Watch White provide his list in the video below:
Ali Abdelaziz, the manager of top MMA talents like Khabib Nurmagomedov and Kamaru Usman, was quick to dismiss White's claim that McGregor should be in the top five. In an interview with ESPN MMA, Abdelaziz pointed to the number of times McGregor has been finished in the octagon as the reason why he does not belong in the conversation of the sport's greatest fighters.
Abdelaziz also suggested that fighters such as Silva and Jones do not belong on the list due to their failed drug tests.
"He mentioned Conor's name, you know, I love Dana, I respect Dana, but that was crazy. Like, how are you going to mention a guy who's been finished 4 or 5 times in the UFC? 4 times, you know, he's not even in the top 10 of the greatest of all time."
Watch the interview below:
While Abdelaziz did not provide a list of his own, he did state that he thinks Kamaru Usman is the greatest fighter of all time. Perhaps if Usman defends his title for the sixth time this weekend, he will be added to Dana White's top-five list, too.
Dana White responds to criticism over fighter-pay comments.
Dana White appeared on Yahoo! Sports earlier this week and spoke to Kevin Iole about all things UFC-related. Iole touched on the attention being focused around White's comments about fighter pay, in which he was perceived to have said that an increase in salaries was "never going to happen" while he is president.
The comment came from an interview he did with GQ Sports, and White was not pleased to find that journalists at ESPN had taken his isolated comments and made it into a headline.
"F*ck you, and you should never f*cking be able to write for anyone ever again. So what I said was, boxing has absolutely been destroyed because of corruption and all this other sh*t. I'm never going to let the things that happened in boxing, happen here while I'm here. That's what it meant."
Watch the interview below:
The issue of fighter pay has been a consistent topic for Dana White to grapple with at press conferences and interviews, and it seems as though his patience may be wearing a little thin.