Famed boxing promoter Oscar De La Hoya decided to step into the MMA game and challenge Dana White and the UFC last month. It did not go well. With his Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz PPV promoted under the Golden Boy MMA banner reportedly only doing 25-30k buys, it’s pretty easy to point at the event as a failure.

But according to De La Hoya, that’s because PPV is suddenly dead.

De La Hoya and White have been bantering back and forth for a while, and White summed up his side of things at the UFC 232 press conference:

”It started with him telling people not to watch Mayweather vs. McGregor,” White recounted at the UFC 232 post-fight press conference (via MMA Mania). “Who does that? Then he came out and basically lied about what guys had been paid, what we were paying fighters, what Chuck Liddell made, what Tito [Ortiz] made. He’s a liar. And I called him out for being a piece of sh-t and a liar.

”See what we do this year. Wait til you see what happens with Oscar De La Hoya in the next three years. You guys know me, some of you have known me for a long time. You wanna battle? I’m your guy. I’m your guy. Let’s do it.”

Oddly, De La Hoya decided to respond by criticizing Jon Jones’ base salary for UFC 232 and throwing out the “PPV is dead” bomb:

500k For Jones, Really?! @danawhite and you say you wanna battle. Wait till the fans realize that PPV is dead. — Oscar De La Hoya (@OscarDeLaHoya) December 30, 2018

Even more oddly, when it was pointed out that Oscar recently promoted an event of his own on PPV, he claimed that the event is why it was dead:

And that’s why it’s dead you dumb ass! https://t.co/lRWpOKJv1N — Oscar De La Hoya (@OscarDeLaHoya) December 31, 2018

See, De La Hoya has a reason to push this narrative - and that’s DAZN. Oscar signed his star boxer, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, to a massive deal on the streaming service that takes him off of pay-per-view. While promoting his first fight there, he used the same claim (via Ring TV)

“I’ve been all over New York, New York City this week and felt a huge, huge buzz,” Oscar stated. “And I want to start by saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen: Pay-per-view is dead.’ I’m actually happy to announce that pay-per-view is dead.”

That was on December 13th, about two weeks after the dreadful Ortiz-Liddell numbers came to light. It’s an amusing claim, considering Canelo reportedly sold 1.1 million PPVs for his rematch against Gennady Golovkin - three months ago. And he promoted that.

This is just Oscar being Oscar. Logic and continuity have never been a big part of his promotional work. But trashing his own PPV is pretty funny, even for De La Hoya.