282 — The Language

At the UFC Freedom 250 press conference, Diego Lopes spoke. Dana White said: "That was English? Oh, shit."

Diego Lopes has worked for the UFC since 2021. He fights at featherweight. He is ranked third in the world. Since joining the UFC, he has appeared at press conferences, recorded promotional content, given interviews to ESPN, and done the standard work of being a fighter that people know about. All of this required speaking into microphones.

Dana White has run the UFC for twenty-four years. He has been at press conferences. He has been in rooms where fighters spoke into microphones. He was in the room when Diego Lopes spoke. The room is where he learned English was happening.

(He has also been in rooms with Khabib Nurmagomedov, Israel Adesanya, Francis Ngannou, and several hundred other fighters from countries where English is not the national language. Some of them also spoke English into microphones at events that Dana White organized. He was in the room for most of these.)

The UFC promotes events in one hundred and ninety-three countries. Diego Lopes is from Brazil. He speaks Portuguese, which is what Brazil speaks, but at the press conference he was speaking English, which Dana White identified as English after hearing it, by asking if it was English.

The answer came from the person asking the question.

What happens next is unclear. The UFC has enough staff that someone could tell Dana White, before a press conference, what language a fighter speaks. This person would listen to Diego Lopes, identify the language as English, and inform Dana White. The UFC has been sending Diego Lopes to press conferences for three years. The language has been the same at every one of them.

"That was English? Oh, shit."

It was. It is. It will continue to be.