A potential heavyweight superfight between light heavyweight champion and pound-for-pound king Jon Jones and the hard-hitting Francis Ngannou was recently shuttered by UFC president Dana White.
The blame was placed squarely on the shoulders of Jones, who, according to White, asked for an “absurd” amount of money for the fight.
"For the amount of money he's asking for, it's not going to happen," White told ESPN. "He couldn't be asking for a more absurd amount of money at a worse time."
Jones has since refuted White’s claims and went as far as suggesting that White was not being truthful with negotiations for a potential showdown.
Dana White addressed the media on Friday and gave a little more clarity on the breakdown of negotiations for a Jones-Ngannou fight and reluctantly added some specifics for clarity.
“We have text messages from Jon Jones,” White said. “It’s not like I can’t prove that what I’m saying is true because we have text messages. But I’m not going to put his text messages out in the press."
After being pressed for a number, White caved in.
“I’ll quote him on what he said, and he said I want what Deontay Wilder made against Tyson Fury,” White revealed.
Wilder’s contractually guaranteed purses for his third fight with Fury was $5 million. However, according to reports, Wilder ended up with somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million to $30 million with an upside of pay-per-view profits, and that appears to be the number that White is pointing to.
Jones' highest disclosed purse to date is $500,000, which was made for each of his past seven fights. Those numbers do not include any additional figures made from pay-per-view buys. It's well known that the fighters often make far more than what is disclosed, but the exact number is seldom revealed. Nevertheless, Jones' guaranteed purse is far less than what Wilder's guarantee was for his February fight with Fury.