Craig Borsari has now added a key detail to one of the most talked-about parts of the UFC White House event: despite Dana White’s earlier Oval Office tease, the UFC’s chief content officer says that privilege will not extend to every fighter on the card.
Dana Whitepreviously said fighters would walk from the Oval Office, but Borsari explained in a new interview that the promotion is reserving that entrance for select moments while planning other White House-based walkouts for the rest of the lineup.
Speaking withJake Arieron Against the Cage, Borsari addressed the question directly when asked which fighters would make the Oval Office walk. He said:
“I will say not everybody is walking from the Oval Office. That’s a pretty special location to start a fighter walk. You can imagine who, you know, where what we’re saving that for.”
Borsari added that the rest of the card still will not get standard arena-style walkouts. He said fighters will emerge from other parts of the White House complex, which the UFC production team sees as a major visual element for the broadcast.
“There are other locations within the White House that the fighters will emanate from. They are incredibly compelling and cool spaces for our production team to figure out ways to capture the images of the fighters coming out of different areas of the White House.
“They are incredibly compelling and cool spaces for our production team to figure out ways to capture the images of the fighters coming out of different areas of the White House. There’s a lot of really interesting and fun executions for the fighter walks that you’ll see.”
That clarification matters because Dana White hadpreviouslydescribed the event in sweeping terms. In comments carried by several outlets in March, White said, “The fighters are going to walk out of the Oval Office” and, “They’re walking from the Oval Office,” which created the impression that the entire card might use the same entrance. Borsari’s comments sharpen that picture and suggest the UFC is treating the Oval Office as a featured presentation point rather than a universal staging area.
“For the better part of the last year have been working on this project on a daily basis. Six to eight months out has been virtually all I’ve been working on. The magnitude of this event, the logistics, the things that we just never anticipated leading up to it, are all things that take a tremendous amount of planning, coordination, and communication with the broader team.”
The interview also gave a better sense of how much work has gone into the June 14eventon the South Lawn. Borsari said he has been working on the project daily for “the better part of the last year,” and that for the past six to eight months it has been “virtually all” he has worked on. ESPN previously reported that White said Borsari had already met with White House operations staff “10 times now” as the UFC mapped out the logistics.
Source: LowKickMMA.com
