Dana White says he is “not confident at all” that a deal with Trevor Wittman to bring his Onyx gloves into the UFC will ever happen, revealing that negotiations broke down years ago over a financial demand he described as impossible to meet.
White addressed the situation at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 279 press conference after Wittman told Joe Rogan on The JRE MMA Show that UFC executive Hunter Campbell had recently restarted discussions.
“We’ve been talking to Trevor for years. Rashad Evans, whom I love and respect, came to me and said, ‘Hey, listen: I’m invested in this thing. We think we have a great product here and I would love to introduce our glove that Trevor built.’ All those guys are like, ‘Trevor’s a genius, he makes these bags and these gloves.’ So we looked at it all and I literally told my finance team, ‘Get this deal done. I don’t care what it takes. Get the deal done.’ They wanted like $100 million for the glove. You know how many f*cking gloves you’ve got to sell to make $100 million? It’s impossible. So the deal never happened.”
He was blunt about his current level of optimism.
“I am not confident at all. We’ll fight in the Colosseum before that deal gets done. It’s almost the same money.”
Wittman’s curved glove design is intended to keep a fighter’s hand naturally in a fist position rather than with fingers extended, which is the primary cause of eye pokes in MMA. Rogan had called it “f***ing criminal” that the gloves are not already in use.