By Lewis Mckeever:
What was initially intended to be just a bit of banter amongst the MMA community, as CagePotato attempted to inject their own humour into the Jon Jones-UFC sponsorship deal, matters have abruptly developed into a war of legalities.

CagePotato recently felt the full wrath of Dana White’s fury, as he demanded them to remove the joking caption beneath the picture of himself and Jon Jones. The image description insinuated that the UFC boss had placed a $500,000 bet on Jon Jones to emerge victorious in this Saturday’s showdown with Rashad Evans. Dana certainly wasn’t laughing, and now, neither are the gang over at CagePotato.

CagePotato were willing to comply with the UFC’s legal squad, immediately removing the offensive quotation from their website:

“On Saturday, we published a post about the UFC’s sponsorship of Jon Jones for his upcoming fight against Rashad Evans, which included a satirical caption about UFC president Dana White betting money on the fight. The caption was intended to be a joke, and we were confident that it would interpreted that way by our readers. Earlier today, we received a press release announcing that the UFC and Dana White are demanding a retraction “regarding certain false and defamatory statements attributed to UFC® President, Dana White.”

“CagePotato doesn’t contest any part of (the UFC) request; we hereby retract the line in question, which has since been removed from our site. Again, the caption wasn’t published with any malicious intent whatsoever, but we understand that Dana White’s reputation would be harmed if our readers actually believed that he bets on the UFC’s matches. Once again, Dana White does not bet on his own fights, and he never has. We apologize for any misunderstanding the caption may have caused.”

Ben Goldstein, managing editor over at CagePotato, recently chatted with Sergio Non at USA Today and thinks that the entire situation is just silly:

“This is just so silly that I want to print this retraction and get this behind us. I have no (problem) saying on our website, ‘Look, it’s just a joke. We didn’t mean it to be intended this way.’ I’m just not interested in turning this into some sort of beef with UFC. It’s really not that important to me.”

“Maybe it’s something that hits very close to home for him,” Goldstein says. “He doesn’t want to be seen as someone who would ever bet on his own fights. … I can respect that, because if people started believe that the head of UFC was actually betting on his own fights, that’s a serious allegation.”

The drama doesn’t end there. CagePotato writer Jason Moles tried to reason with Dana through twitter:

@DanaWhite Here is @CagePotatoMMA‘s retraction. cagepotato.com/retraction-dan… We cool?

— Jason Moles (@TheJasonMoles) April 17, 2012

Dana’s response?

@TheJasonMoles not even close

— Dana White (@danawhite) April 17, 2012

Ben Goldstein shared more thoughts with USA Today:
“I have no problem swallowing my ego and apologizing for a joke,” he said. “But if it turns out that they want to set their lawyers on us on a regular basis because of satirical captions we write on our website, then we’ll fight back. We’ll get our own lawyers involved and defend ourselves. … We’re not going to change the way we do business.”

Sergio Non responded by reporting the one documented occurrence of Dana White betting on MMA:
“While White hasn’t gambled on UFC fights, he has bet on one of his fighters loaned to another organization. In 2003, he made a $250,000 wager with the president of Pride Fighting Championships, Nobuyuki Sakakibara, that Chuck Liddell would win that organization’s 205-pound tournament that year. Liddell lost in the semifinals to Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, who fought for Pride at the time.”

If you are lost and have no idea what has been going on, read the original story HERE.

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