#dana-whites-contender-series

#dana-whites-contender-series

A Contender Series fight is one that has stakes like none other, where fighters must showcase their skills to impress the UFC president enough for a contract with the promotional giant. Holding the Contender Series with a smaller cage inside the UFC Apex venue makes for a tense atmosphere, and with only close friends and family of the competing fighters in attendance as spectators.

Kicking off this UFC Shanghai edition of TTP is our interview with Dana White's Contender Series welterweight, Wes Schultz. Schultz talks about his first run on the Contende Series, where he faced Mansur Abdul-Malik. Then he shares where his head went in between fights and whether or not he'd be invited back to the show. After that "Party Time" breaks down his upcoming fight with Mario Mingaj, which takes place during an October episode of Dana White's Contender Series.

A Contender Series fight is one that has stakes like none other, where fighters must showcase their skills to impress the UFC president enough for a contract with the promotional giant. Holding the Contender Series with a smaller cage inside the UFC Apex venue makes for a tense atmosphere, and with only close friends and family of the competing fighters in attendance as spectators.

I'm very, very happy with being here, to be able to win and get this contract for the UFC,

"That was a big thing that came up. It actually came from DC [Daniel Cormier], there was a video of DC where he's like 'we don't back up, we don't back up.' And that's true, we came here to fight. Obviously you want to be calculated, but at the end of the day we did come here to scrap, we came here to fight. So that's where that 'don't back up' comes from."

In the featured bout, Trent Miller was set to face Ryan Gandra in middleweight action. Gandra was an LFA veteran riding a six-fight win streak into DWCS. Almost as important, five of those six wins had come inside the distance, a mixture of KO/TKOs and submissions. Miller, who had also competed for LFA in the past as well as Tuff-N-Uff and UFL, had won two straight.