A Tough Summer in Denver and DirecTV Outage Didn’t Help UFC 150 Sales

The state of Colorado has had an extremely rough summer.

A series of wildfires in the state spread over acreage measuring in the hundreds of thousands, while thousands of residents were forced to flee their homes.

It didn’t get any easier when a psychopath opened fire in a suburban Denver movie theater on the opening night of “The Dark Knight Rises,” killing 12 and injuring 58 others.

So in the grand scheme of things, the residents of Colorado have obviously had a lot more important issues on their minds that didn’t include a mixed martial arts event coming to town.

UFC 150: Henderson vs. Edgar II landed in Denver on Saturday night and while the attendance for the show packed the Pepsi Center, the overall gate only amassed $650,000, the lowest for a UFC pay-per-view since 2007, according to UFC president Dana White.

White says that they discussed the issues with ticket sales amongst UFC staff and executives, and ultimately Colorado has just had so much ill fortune lately that the least of their worries was attending an MMA event this month.

“Talking about it, the shootings here, the fires that have been going on here, it’s been a really bad summer for this place,” White said after UFC 150 ended. “Once all that stuff started going down, we kind of felt it was not going to be a good gate here.”

The live gate suffering was a foreseeable action when looking at the locale of the event and the situations that had befallen the residents of Colorado.

As far as the pay-per-view sales, UFC 150 also took a major hit for unforeseen reasons.

White revealed that satellite provider DirecTV went down for Saturday night, causing subscribers to not be able to view or purchase the UFC 150 event at home.

Overall, White just has to chalk it up to a bad night for UFC 150 to take place.

“We couldn’t get kicked in the balls worse than we did tonight.”

Follow @DamonMartin on Twitter or e-mail Damon Martin.
For more UFC News and UFC Rumors, follow MMAWeekly.com on Twitter and Facebook.