Dana White: Wladimir Klitschko should have been disqualified.

 

UFC promoter Dana White wasn’t impressed at all with what he saw from IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (61-3, 51 KO’s) from his win over WBA champion Alexander Povetkin (26-1, 18 KO’s) two weeks ago in Moscow, Russia. White thinks that Wladimir should have been disqualified in the final round of dull bout because he was holding and not trying to fight. White was totally disappointed in Wladimir’s performance.

White told the Telegraph “He [Wladimir] should have been disqualified. In the 12th round he didn’t even throw a punch. That’s the heavyweight champion of the world. It’s embarrassing…He doesn’t want to fight. He runs and grabs onto you. It’s disgusting. I can’t believe they found someone to pay him $17 million dollars.”

 

Yes, it is hard to understand why the referee didn’t step in to take points off from Wladimir early in the fight for his constant holding and leaning. If the referee had done his job by giving Wladimir three or four stern warnings in the first three rounds of the fight, then we might have seen a much different fight. But then again, if Wladimir had chose to ignore the referee’s warnings, we might have seen him get disqualified after he lost a couple of points. I can’t see a referee taking off more than two points for Wladimir holding before he would disqualify him.

If you look at the old fight between Lennox Lewis and Henry Akinwande on Youtube, you’ll notice that Akinwande was holding just like Wladimir, yet Akindwande was disqualified in the 5th round in that fight after being warned. With Wladimir-Povetkin, we didn’t see Wlad getting warned for holding. We saw him getting warned and eventually penalized for him shoving Povetkin to the canvas, but not for the holding.

I’m not much of a fan of MMA, but White’s done a good job of making the fights more entertaining than they used to be by having the fighters stand up a lot more than they did in the past. There’s a lot less wrestling and more stand up. I can see why he wouldn’t like how Wladimir fought Povetkin, because it wasn’t an entertaining fight. I mean, the Moscow crowd booed constantly and a lot of that was because of Wladimir’s holding. If Wladimir was one of White’s UFC fighters, I could see White having a long talk with Wladimir after this performance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if White cut his ties with him.