UFC bantamweight fighter Merab Dvalishvili has zero tolerance for either opponent or fan and Dana White is unphased by his actions.
The fighter recently made an appearance at UFC 310, but he got into a heated argument with a fan after going up to meet Aljamain Sterling during his battle with Movsar Evloev. The fight soon escalated, and Dvalishvili had to be taken out of the situation by security after the fan swung at one of Sterling’s coaches, and Dvalishvili tried to reciprocate.
The altercation came as a shock to many fans and fighters, but UFC CEO Dana White was unsurprised by this turn of events. White says Dvalishvili does not discriminate either in the cage or outside. He says the fighter will get into it with anyone who crosses his path.
“He’s my mini-[Sean] Strickland. Without the mouth,” White said at the UFC 310 post-fight press conference. “What do you do? Let him buy the pay-per-view, I guess. I don’t know. You can’t keep fighting with f*cking fans. You can do it. It’s going to cost you a lot of money. I don’t know.
“I say it all the time. We’re in the f*cking fight business. This happens. We’ve got to deal with it.”
“Listen, Merab’s that guy. He’s that guy,” White said. “This isn’t his first altercation. I don’t know if you guys noticed at the press conference yesterday, too, to the right somebody yelled something and he’s in the middle of a conversation and he’s trying to see who said that. Like what, you’re going to run over there and you’re going to fight this guy, too? It’s just the way he is. He’s built that way.
“I don’t know if you saw, he wasn’t sitting in the regular fighter section. I had to move him over, had to move the other two guys over at our table. We try to diffuse this stuff before it happens and tonight we had a good game plan. I didn’t think he’d get into a fight walking out with Aljamain.”
White says moving on, he would have to watch Dvalishvili in the upcoming press conference for UFC 311 to avoid an incident like what occurred between Sean Strickland and Dricus Du Plessis in 2023. White admits that a lot of fighters are just like that, and it may be due to them having those sharpened killer instincts from competing in the cage.
“Merab’s fighting people in the f*cking stands. Merab would get in a fight in the middle of the fighter section,” White said. “That’s why we moved him over to the left. So I wouldn’t say that any of these guys are afraid of anybody or any fight. But fighters are a paranoid bunch.
“There’s always some conspiracy against them. Whether it’s us or other people. We make fights people want to see. They win or lose the fights on their own but they are conspiracy theorists. They always think that somebody is against them and maybe that’s what they need to do to have that mental thing to go out and do what they do.”
