Eli Manning was in the midst of his opening monologue as host of Saturday Night Live over the weekend when, live from New York, the Giants quarterback offered to show off his local knowledge by taking questions from tourists in the audience. Immediately, an SNL cast member planted in the crowd asked where her family could find some of the city’s legendary Italian food. And Eli drew a laugh by pointing her in the direction of an Olive Garden across the Hudson River. “Hey,” said Manning, “I play for the New York Giants, and all my games are played in New Jersey.”

Dana White could have told the same joke.

Then again, the UFC president might not find the humor in his fight organization’s protracted and still-fruitless bid to have mixed martial arts sanctioned in New York, as it is in nearly every other state in the nation. Especially after Monday’s news that the State Assembly once again will not bring an MMA bill to a vote this year.

According to a report in the New York Daily News, a conference of Democrats discussed the bill behind closed doors and Speaker Sheldon Silver, even while acknowledging that members were “pretty evenly divided,” decided to not bring the measure to the full Assembly. The Manhattan legislator did acknowledge, however, that the tide is turning. “I think it’s evolving,” he told the Daily News. “I don’t think two years ago it was a 50-50 proposition.” Other legislators told the newspaper that the informal tally actually tilted in favor of the MMA bill.

Naturally, this turn of events left UFC officials disappointed, even perturbed. “I feel 150 percent if we had a vote on the floor of the Assembly, we would win,” Marc Ratner, the company’s vice president of regulatory affairs, told the paper. “Not to get a vote is un-American.”

And yet unsurprising.

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Anderson Silva (left) and Chael Sonnen (right) will finally wage their anticipated rematch at UFC 148 in Las Vegas on July 7. (Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC)

Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen are still scheduled to meet this summer, and that’s good news for fight fans.

But some bad news surrounding the rematch came Tuesday morning when the Brazilian UFC middleweight champion, his self-proclaimed beltholder of an opponent and Dana White, the fight organization’s president, showed up in Rio de Janeiro to announce that the bout no longer would be held in a stadium there on June 23, as scheduled, but was being moved to July 7 in Las Vegas.

The fight hasn’t exactly lost its luster — Vegas has more of that than anywhere else on the planet — but it’s lost a good bit of the grit and righteousness that have made this rematch’s backstory so intriguing.

You see, the fight is not simply between Silva and Sonnen. Chael, with his WWE-style bluster, has turned it into him vs. Brazil with his trash-talk ridicule of the country’s top fighters and even the nation itself. The mockery of the Nogueira brothers, Vitor Belfort, Wanderlei Silva and the like is fair game; they’re all big boys who can take care of themselves. But Sonnen’s rhetoric about Brazil has veered into ugly-American xenophobia.

“When I was a little kid, I remember going outside and sitting with my friends,” Sonnen said during the press conference. “We’d talk about the latest technology and medicine and gaming and American ingenuity.” Then he brought his story to the present day to draw a contrast, saying, “And I’d look outside and Anderson and the Brazilian kids are sitting outside playing the mud.”

That’s Chael at his mildest. In past diatribes, he’s characterized Brazil as backward in far more insulting ways. And he’s done so with little or no backlash, as the MMA media — and I must lump myself in the horde, unfortunately — mostly just yuks it up with the guy.

So Brazil deserved its shot at Sonnen. Sure, he appeared Tuesday in a Rio conference room, and I half-expected to see a shoe thrown at his head, a la George W. Bush before the Baghdad media. But a press conference isn’t enough. After talking the talk, he should have been made to walk the walk — that is, stroll out to the octagon in a soccer stadium filled with Brazilians excited to see him get beat up by the champ.

It’s just not going to work out in Brazil, however. My first thought upon hearing of the fight’s relocation was that the UFC feared for Sonnen’s safety. That might actually be the reason, but the public explanation is that the Rio stadium event fell apart because of the United Nations’ Rio+20 Conference taking place the same week, eating up hotel rooms and making a UFC event a logistical impossibilty. So there go the plans of sustainability for conference attendees who were hoping to catch the fights, too.

There still will be a UFC 147 fight card in Brazil — there’s no date set, but it’ll be in an arena, not in a stadium, and still feature a showdown of The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil coaches Belfort and Wanderlei Silva, plus the reality show’s middleweight and featherweight finals and a Fabricio Werdum-Mike Russow heavyweight bout. White said Tuesday he might also put featherweight champion José Aldo on the card. So it’s not all bad news for Brazilian fans.

And by moving Silva-Sonnen II to Las Vegas, White has transformed UFC 148 into a Fourth of July fireworks spectacle. In addition to the fight for the middleweight championship, there also will be a bantamweight tile bout between The Ultimate Fighter: Live coaches Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber plus a Tito Ortiz vs. Forrest Griffin rubber match (perhaps Tito’s final fight), Rich Franklin vs. Cung Le and Michael Bisping vs. Tim Boetsch.

All’s well that ends well, then? That’s what White would have you believe. “This is going to be a global event. If we were going to do it here in Brazil, it needed to be done in a huge soccer stadium,” he said. “As we got into the logistics of trying to make this thing happen here, we just couldn’t pull it off. If we couldn’t do it here, then Las Vegas was the only other option.”

Silva took some convincing to make the move, according to While, although the champion was nothing but agreeable at the press conference. “I’m a UFC athlete, and I have fans all over the world,” he said. “Regardless of where this fight takes place, I will represent Brazil, and I will do my job and defend my belt.”

That was the professional thing for him to say. But the fans in his home country deserved better.

– Jeff Wagenheim

Dana White interacts with his more than two million followers on Twitter during Saturday night's UFC 145 card in Atlanta. (Bryan Armen Graham/SI.com)

ATLANTA — Dana White is a sick man.

It’s 8:51 p.m. on fight night and the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship has just been shot up with two bags of IV fluids in an anonymously marked lounge in the bowels of Philips Arena. Food poisoning, he explains, from a bad turkey burger during last night’s red-eye from Las Vegas.

“I can’t f—ing believe I’m standing here,” White says, nursing a three-quarters-full SmartWater bottle filled with a urine-colored fluid (“Pedialyte,” he says). “I thought I was going to die this morning. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t walk. I was sweating like someone sprayed me with a hose. I was sprawled out on the marble floor of my bathroom.”

Yet White is on his feet, peering at a MacBook screen over the shoulder of Kristin Adams, the UFC’s 28-year-old social media whiz, who is busy engaging with celebrities and fans buzzing about tonight’s UFC 145 card. His attention diverts to the flatscreen TV showing the undercard bout currently happening outside between Mac Danzig and Efrain Escudaro.

As Adams reads aloud tweets from celebrities posting about the fight — Criss Angel, Jerry Rice, Jim Norton, Kelly Slater — White dictates rapid-fire responses as he unboxes a new cell phone. He directs Adams to tweet out the number, offering his more than two million followers an opportunity to trade opinions with one of the most powerful and unorthodox executives in sports.

White spoke on the phone Saturday night with several UFC fans, who called a phone number he posted on Twitter. (Bryan Armen Graham/SI.com)

“There’s no service down here, they’re all going to voice mail,” he says. “Five voice mails, six voice mails, seven voice mails.”

Finally the phone rings; a fan calling from Sweden made it through. “Who’s this?” White asks, before reassuring the voice on the other end, “I swear to God it’s really me.”

Another caller rings from New Zealand. Another from North Carolina. Another calls from inside the arena and asks if he can attend the post-fight press conference. White gets an assistant to take down his seat location and cell phone number and makes it happen. “Thanks so much for the support, bro,” he says before clicking over to the next call.

It’s White’s hands-on approach that’s helped make MMA the world’s fastest growing sport, but it’s his willingness to reach out and connect with the fans that create a brand loyalty that ensures they’ll be long-term customers.

It’s hard to imagine Roger Goodell or David Stern shooting the bull with fans before an important game. “I don’t understand why though,” White says. “It’s so easy to do. It takes two seconds.”

– Bryan Armen Graham

Cristiane 'Cyborg' Santos' is eligible to apply for license reinstatement on Dec. 16.

Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos has begun the process to appeal a one-year suspension handed down by the California State Athletic Commission on Jan. 6 for alleged steroid use, her personal manager confirmed to SI.com.

Santos’ manager, who asked not to be identified by name, said a response letter was mailed to the CSAC on Monday requesting a hearing in front of the seven-member commission.

The CSAC suspended the Strikeforce 145-pound women’s champion after a pre-fight urinalysis came back positive for Stanzolol metabolites following Santos’ dominant 16-second victory over Hiroko Yamanaka on Dec. 17. As it stands, Santos will be eligible to appear before the CSAC for license reinstatement on Dec. 16. Santos was also ordered to pay a $2,500 fine and the fight’s result was changed to a “No Decision” by the CSAC.

CSAC Executive Officer George Dodd said Santos’ appeal would likely be heard at an April 9 meeting with the venue to be determined.

Santos, 26, issued an apology and explanation for the positive drug test on Jan. 9, stating she’d taken a dietary supplement to assist her during a difficult weight cut and was assured the supplement was “safe and not prohibited from use in sports competition.”

Santos’ manager said its believed that the supplement in question was given to the fighter by a “trusted individual” in her camp to take orally, but that all the supplements she took are currently being reviewed.

In California, a handful of the 20-plus MMA fighters previously flagged have explained positive steroid tests through supplements they’ve taken, though none have received reduced suspensions. Overall, only two fighters, Sean Sherk and Phil Baroni in 2007, have had their suspensions reduced based on chain-of-custody issues the CSAC had with their urine samples. The CSAC has since refined its drug-testing protocol.

Santos (12-1, 1 NC) re-signed with Strikeforce for multiple fights over the summer after Zuffa, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s parent company, acquired the rival promotion last March.

She has come under great public scrutiny since the performance-enhancing drug allegations were announced, as her Strikeforce reign has been the most dominant of any champion in the organization since she earned the inaugural title in 2009.

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Rashad Evans (left) made an insensitive comment about the Penn State scandal Wednesday at a press conference to promote UFC on Fox 2. (Youtube.com)

UFC bantamweight Miguel Torres has been dropped by the organization on the heels of his tweet this week about a “rape van,” SI.com has learned. Meanwhile, UFC president Dana White says the details regarding insensitive remarks made by a remorseful Rashad Evans were such that Evans won’t suffer a similar fate.

In a Q&A with SI.com Thursday afternoon, White shared this thoughts about the miscues after they had gone viral over the previous 24 hours. Torres had come under fire for posting a tweet that read: “If a rape van was called a surprise van more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone like surprises.” Evans, meanwhile, during a public press conference promoting his Jan. 28 fight on Fox,  said to his opponent, former Penn State wrestler Phil Davis, “I guarantee you’ll be the first one to take a [wrestling] shot. Guarantee. Because I’m going to put my hands on you worse than that dude did them other kids at Penn State.”

SI.com: Let’s talk about Rashad.

Dana White: First of all, if you saw the press conference, it was the worst microphone system in the history of this company. The microphones at this place either didn’t work or they’d go in and out in between every word you said. So Rashad said that [the Penn State joke] yesterday. I didn’t even hear what he said. And it didn’t even get back to me until I landed in Toronto, which was four hours later.

Here’s the other thing you’ve got to understand. With my fighters, there’s no excuses like, “Hey, listen, he’s a dumb guy. Came from the mean streets of somewhere. He’s just not all that bright.” These are educated guys, most of them went to college, they have families, children, etc. These are smart, rational people I’m dealing with.

So when I call Rashad about this thing, he’s like, “You know what Dana,” and gives me the context of it. Him and Davis started getting into this heated back-and-forth about what they’re going to do to each other the night of the fight. Davis went to Penn State. Davis wrestled for Penn State. Rashad wrestled for Michigan. [Rashad] said, “It just came out.” Zing him and zing his school at the same time. Very, very poor choice of words. I mean, it was the stupidest thing he could have said and he absolutely agrees.

So we talked on the phone, he gave me his explanation, he said, “I’ll do whatever it takes, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anybody. In the heat of the moment, that’s what I said to him because he’s from Penn State.”

SI.com: So you didn’t hear it during the press conference? No one said anything to you right after you walked off?

White: No! Nobody said anything at the press conference. Nobody said anything on Twitter that had watched it. It wasn’t until ESPN wrote a story that anybody said anything to me.

SI.com: So you didn’t take any recourse with Rashad? There was no fine?

White: I talked to Rashad. Rashad walked me through what he did. He went to Penn State. [He said] I wanted to slam him and Penn State. I’m not like traditional sports [executives]: “All right Rashad, pay us 30 grand.” That stuff is all formalities to make it look good. Yeah, he was fined, he was this, he was that. Rashad is sorry for what he said. He truly is. He said it in the heat of the moment. He definitely took the wrong choice of words. He knows it and I know he knows it.

SI.com: And what about Miguel Torres’ tweet from yesterday?

White: This morning I’m on [Michael] Landsberg’s show, up here in Canada, and he hits me with the quote of what he tweeted. Now there’s no explanation for that. There’s absolutely nothing I could say to make any sense of that. And the fact that he even thinks that’s funny or that’s a joke, it disturbs me. It bothers me. Again, you’re dealing with a guy that’s a smart guy, that owns his own business, that’s been one of the top fighters in the world forever. And I cut him today. He’s no longer with the UFC.

SI.com: Was that announced today?

White: It’s being announced right now to you. You’re the only one that knows. Miguel Torres has been cut from the UFC and his career with us now is over.

SI.com: Was this the first time something’s happened with Torres? Or was it a second offense?

White: No, this was the first time. And then he said he hadn’t heard what happened to Forrest [Griffin, who drew fire for tweeting "Rape is the new missionary" last month]. Really? Where do you live? What business are you in? How do you not hear about these things? You should have paid more attention. It’s to the point now where, there’s going be times when things happen and mistakes are made. I cannot defend Miguel Torres. I cannot defend what he said. What he said makes no sense other than when he says, “It was a joke.” Well, I don’t think that’s a funny joke. I think it’s disturbing.

SI.com: So many of the major sports leagues have been curtailing their athletes’ involvement on Twitter, but the UFC has been praised for being so progressive and forward-thinking with social media. Are we now seeing the perils of that?

White: No. I’m a firm believer in … just because these guys are professional athletes or whatever, everybody’s going to have an opinion on something, and not everybody’s going to get along. I’ve had my words with fans on Twitter too. When people come on Twitter and say dumb s— to you, expect to get some dumb s— back. But for a guy to go out and talk about a “rape van” being a “surprise van,” there’s no defense for that.

And I’m a realist. I treat people and I deal with my fighters and I deal with the fans like a real person. I don’t come out and read canned statements written by our lawyers. I deal with the guys on a case-by-case basis and how they handle themselves. We’re all entitled to make mistakes. I’m not one of these guys where if you make a mistake, I’m gonna try to tear your life down and burn it to the ground.

We just had one of our fighters, Chris Leben, test positive for [Oxycodone and Oxymorphone], and he’s been suspended for a year by the UFC. Now with the suspension it’s not like, “Hey, Chris, you’re suspended, we don’t want to hear from you in a year, good luck with your career and everything else, and if it doesn’t work out, oh well, there’s a million other fighters waiting to line up.” I care about this guy, as a person, as a human being, before he’s a fighter. And I want to make sure Chris Leben is OK. If he needs any type of therapy or rehab or whatever it might be to make sure his personal life is on track, that means more to me than anything else. There’s going to be guys that are going to make mistakes. Some guys are going to make mistakes bad enough that they’re going to burn themselves to the ground. It’s all in how a guy handles himself after he makes a mistake. That’s what I care about.

SI.com: You’ve said the first two years of the new Fox deal will be the most important 24 months in the UFC’s history. Part of the appeal of the sport is how raw and unfiltered a lot of the guys are. Is there a balance need to find between the two forces?

White: I want this sport to stay exactly the same. We’re the most fan-accessible sport out there. When you show up at an event, you talk to fighters and you meet fighters. A lot of times, [the fans and the media] live in a fantasy land, like these guys aren’t real human beings. But the one thing I can consistently say about my guys is they’re fan-accessible. It’s the way that it is. And it’s never going to be perfect, but we treat our fans better than any other sports league does. We’re going to have times when guys are gonna say some stupid stuff, but I handle them on a case-by-case basis.

– As told to Bryan Armen Graham

In a misguided attempt at self-promotion, UFC light heavyweight contender Rashad Evans compared his hands to the ones put on the alleged victims of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal during an open-to-the-public press conference held Wednesday in Chicago.

Evans faces Phil Davis in a contender’s bout airing live on Jan. 28 on Fox — the promotion’s sophomore event on broadcast television since signing into a seven-year, rumored $700 million deal with Fox Sports Media Group in August.

The former UFC champion made the comment just hours after former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had been arrested and jailed again on new child sex abuse charges after two more alleged victims came forward to authorities.

“I guarantee you’ll be the first one to take a [wrestling] shot,” Evans told Davis. “Guarantee. Because I’m going to put my hands on you worse than that dude did them other kids at Penn State.”

Davis, a Penn State wrestling alumnus, lowered his head as the remark drew a mixture of cheers and jeers from attending fans.

The press conference was streamed live on the Internet, where tens of thousands of fans have tuned in to watch events like this in the past.

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Junior Dos Santos scored a first-round knockout of Cain Velasquez in 64 seconds. (Jason Redmond/AP)

What does the Ultimate Fighting Championship look like on live network television? We got a taste of it Saturday when Fox aired the UFC heavyweight championship between Cain Velasquez and Junior Dos Santos. For fight fans, this was a pinnacle moment — a chance to share the very best of the sport they love with co-workers, friends and family who’d never watched it before. The fight lasted only 64 seconds, but there was much more than that to glean from this historical broadcast. Here are my observations …

Strong start out of the blocks

Fox Sports Media Group CEO David Hill wasn’t kidding when he told reporters earlier this week the network would add a cheeky viewer warning to the telecast. You knew you were going to be watching something different when Fox flashed this at the top of the hour:

UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre suffered a knee injury during training on Tuesday and will miss his upcoming fight at UFC 137. (AP)

The main event of UFC 137 has changed … again.

UFC welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre has been forced to withdraw from his Oct. 29 title fight with Carlos Condit due to a knee injury suffered during training, according to UFC president Dana White’s Twitter feed.

“I just land in NYC and what do I always say!? I have to deal with bad s— everyday!! GSP is out with an injury!!! #oneofthosedays,” Dana White tweeted on Tuesday.

St-Pierre, widely regarded as one of the two best pound-for-pound fighters in MMA (he’s No. 2 in SI.com’s rankings), had been training in Montreal for the 10th defense of the welterweight title he’s held over two stints since 2007.

B.J. Penn will now meet Nick Diaz in the main event, while Carlos Condit will be removed from the card to wait for the champion to recover.

“It’s GSP’S knee. We will sit Carlos to wait for GSP. It’s looking so far like he could be ready in a couple months. Still early to tell tho,” White tweeted minutes after his initial tweet that broke the news.

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If anyone might have an interest in an anti-trust investigation against the UFC, it's Jon Fitch -- but he could be better served by a fighters' union. (AP)

An unlikely source is criticizing the UFC. It’s not a fighter unhappy with his contract or an agent who thinks his client deserves a title shot.

No, it’s a group of cooks.

As reported in a post on The Economist‘s Game Theory blog, Culinary Workers Union Local 226, a Las Vegas-based trade union that represents 60,000 hotel and casino employees, has written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate the UFC for “widespread anti-competitive practices.” It also suggests that the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act — a law passed in 2000 to protect boxers from greedy promoters and sanctioning bodies since there is no single governing organization in boxing — could possibly be expanded to mixed martial arts.

The key difference between the Ultimate Fighting Championship and other top-level professional sports leagues in America is UFC fighters aren’t unionized. Expanding the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act to MMA would give fighters more freedom, and therefore more leverage, which might be a good thing. To see a UFC fighter who could use some more leverage one needs look no further than consensus No. 1 welterweight contender Jon Fitch.

Fitch was briefly cut by the UFC when he refused to sign a lifetime contract with THQ to be included in the UFC Undisputed video-game franchise. Although he was uncomfortable giving THQ his lifetime video rights, Fitch relented when he realized his choice was sign the contract or never fight in the UFC again. UFC commissioner Dana White re-signed the welterweight after he agreed to the contract with THQ.

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