The coronavirus pandemic has already postponed UFC events indefinitely, including UFC 249, but not without the company's president Dana White telling ESPN that "Fight Island is real" and events are roughly a month away from being held there.
The latter would help explain why Henry Cejudo is demanding that White immediately tells him the status of UFC 250 on May 9. The UFC bantamweight champion was slated to face Jose Aldo in Rio de Janeiro on that date, but the ongoing COVID-19 global crisis dashed that location. Now, Cejudo just wants to know if White is still planning to have that fight at all, and if so, its location, so he could plan accordingly.
"I think we need to have a conversation with Dana and everybody there, because you don't want to train and have them give you a certain date, and then you're not peaking at the right time," Cejudo told ESPN on Monday. "My training is very methodical. Everything I do has to be precise, to make sure I'm 100 percent. You can't surprise me before, two weeks.
"I need to know today," he added. "I don't have time to waste if this is going to happen. The UFC has postponed a lot of things and people spend their hard-earned money on camps, training partners, strength and conditioning coaches. I imagine whether we fight or not, the UFC will compensate a lot of guys who were under contract and had fights."
White already vowed that the UFC would take care of its fighters that were supposed to compete on the UFC 249 card, which was slated for Saturday, April 18, before being postponed.
While speaking with ESPN, Cejudo even tackled the topic of him being open to fight someone else in the case that Aldo can't leave Brazil due to coronavirus travel bans.
"I thought about it, with Dominick (Cruz), he's unpredictable. He's too brittle," Cejudo said. "I'm afraid to sign a contract with him because I'm afraid he won't show up. Frankie Edgar, he was one of the first people I called out. That's a fight that's always kind of given me that appetite for him. He cut to 135 (pounds), but he's a former champion at 155. That really intrigues me."
White still hasn't revealed a physical location for his touted "Fight Island," but did reveal last week that its "infrastructure" was being built. No firm date has been set for the UFC's return just yet.