Former NBA player Jay Williams attended both UFC Freedom 250 and the NBA Finals last week. According to Williams, the event on the White House South Lawn was the better event.
“I was there, 4,000-seat arena [for the UFC]. I gotta be honest, coming off the NBA Finals where I was at multiple NBA Finals games, better event than the NBA Finals,” Williams told Stephen A. Smith on ESPN Monday. “It was a better event than the NBA Finals. With the White House literally being right there, incredible.”
In a post Sunday evening, Smith said the UFC show “look[ed] spectacular” and praised UFC President Dana White.
Credit is due to both Smith and Williams, one of ESPN’s top analysts, for discussing the event honestly. Much of the sports media would not dare say a positive word about the show, considering President Donald Trump promoted it as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.
Presumably, there was too much patriotism and too many White people in attendance for some members of the sports media. Former ESPN host Jemele Hill even compared the event to a Klan rally.
“This UFC 250 event has the feel of a Klan rally,” Hill wrote on Threads. “Just utterly disgraceful and disgusting.”
Is that so?
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Of course, had the NBA staged a similar event at the White House during Barack Obama’s presidency, much of the sports media would have celebrated it.
Williams and Smith deserve credit for taking politics out of the equation. And they’re right. The scene was special. There has never been anything quite like it. According to Dana White, there will never be anything like it again.
“It was an amazing experience; this was a one-of-one,” White told reporters after the event. “It will never happen again.”
White said the UFC spent $60 million to construct the structure housing the Octagon on the South Lawn.
The night also served as another reminder that the UFC has established itself as one of the premier sports organizations in the United States.
There’s an argument that the UFC has surpassed the NHL and PGA, placing it as the fourth most popular league in the United States.
Not bad for an organization that many states would not even sanction at its inception, 32 years ago.
Oh, and Jay Williams is right. UFC Freedom 250 was a better event than the NBA Finals.