Urijah Faber on Dana’s comments of the possible chopping block: “Just media being media.” Or Dana being Dana?

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An interesting interview was posted today by Sports Illustrated featuring “The California Kid” Urijah Faber discussing the bloody axe of Zuffa and the recent firing of Jon Fitch. If you remember, the media scrum was pretty heated after the release of the #9 ranked welterweight and Dana basically said that no one is safe, and more cuts were to come. This led to, well, just read the below paragraph from SI’s interview with Urijah.

SI: Your name was bandied about before your win in last month’s UFC as a possible cut from the promotion. With the specter of being cut hanging over every fighter, does it change the way you fight?

UF: No, I don’t think so. For the record, I saw the interview [with Dana White] and what really happened is they were having a scrum and all this media was asking Dana a bunch of questions about Jon Fitch, why he had to cut him and this and that. And then he goes on this whole big spiel about how everybody is on the chopping block, and everybody is only as good as his next fight and a reporter throws out, What, Urijah Faber, and he goes, “Yeah, you never know.” And that was it. And it became this whole thing where people said Dana said I was going to get cut and it never happened.

Dana came up to me on stage when I weighed in, he was like, ‘Hey man, you know how the media is. I never said that I was going to cut you or thought that we were going to cut you.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know. I watched the interview.’ It was just media being media.

Now, is this fair? How is directly quoting someone the “media being media,” besides in the obvious sense? What does that even mean, Dana? These are Dana White’s EXACT comments from that scrum after being asked about Urijah:

“It could be Saturday, you never know… He’s in one of those situations too, definitely. Saturday could be a bad day for him. We’ve got over a hundred guys (too many). And again, going back to what does a guy do? Does he fight safe> Let me tell you what you better do. You better fight your ass off, make it good and win. That’s what people want to see. People want to see exciting, you know? Unfortunately it sucks. It’d be nice to lay on a guy for three rounds and people would want to buy all your pay-per-views. Welcome to the real world guys, that’s not how it works.”

How is that to be construed by Urijah Faber? How were those words that came from Dana White’s brain, then exited from his mouth transformed in any way? It would be fascinating to know. Sounds like the media is being twisted into the scapegoat here. False memories and fascinating and all, and we would love to discuss them sometime, but not here and now, this is ridiculous.. Granted, the media can run with those comments in multiple ways, most of which were as a negative, and were not giving Faber the benefit of the doubt considering he fits the mold of that exciting fighter Dana was just saying he wanted to keep.

So can we all just be friends, or what? I don’t want to have to bring up the last awkward moment between Urijah and Dana.