Cris “Cyborg” Justino (left) will have to cut weight at 135 pounds to make a fight with UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey. AP
Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White obliterated reports that the mixed martial arts promotional giant has offered Cris “Cyborg” Justino a fight against MMA superstar Ronda Rousey at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas.
Former UFC champion Tito Ortiz, Justino’s former manager who had a falling out with White, said in an interview on AXS TV’s Inside MMA that Justino’s camp had already accepted the UFC’s fight offer.
“I’ve heard from Cris [Justino] actually that the fight that’s supposed to be happening at the Cowboys arena… they offered the fight to Cris. I know her management said yes and I’ve told her, ‘Let’s do it,'” Ortiz said. “So I guess the ball’s all in Ronda’s corner and Ronda wants to do it. Dana said if Cris came down to 135 they’ll make the fight happen, so let’s see if Ronda accepts the fight,” Ortiz said.
But White cleared that the news is “completely untrue.”
“That was a complete lie,” White told Yahoo Sports. “It’s 100 percent a lie. First of all, the UFC doesn’t even talk to Tito Ortiz, so let’s start there. But we haven’t offered any fight to [Justino]. Tito Ortiz is just making this [expletive] up. In no way, shape or form did we offer her a fight against Ronda at Cowboys Stadium. Completely untrue.”
“The problem is, this kind of thing gets out there and picks up momentum when there is no truth to it. And it was just something that he decided to make up. But it’s not true,” White added.
A Rousey-Justino fight has the potential to be the biggest UFC fight ever made with White already predicting it would do more than 2 million pay-per-view buys, according to Yahoo Sports’ Kevin Iole.
But for the fight to happen, Justino must be willing to drop her weight to 135 pounds, a weight class she hasn’t fought in yet and a division where Rousey is the bantamweight champion.