Issue 137

January 2016

Dana White missed more Octagon events than ever before in 2015, suggesting MMA’s most important executive was drifting away from the sport. But the UFC president has been chasing talent, breaking new ground, and driving MMA like never before.

"I love this stuff. I’ll be doing it until I drop dead,” Dana White tells Fighters Only. If anyone thought the UFC president, one of the most powerful men in sports, was slowing down, then you have been told.

White has changed. Boston begat him, Las Vegas has tinged him with gold. Ronda Rousey has changed him; his three growing children have changed him. “I don’t know if they’re changing me as I’m getting older or I’m just getting older. We’re men. Men are knuckleheads, man,” explains White, with that unmistakable candidness when you face off with him. 

“Without your kids... If I didn’t have kids, who knows what the f**k I’d be. I’d be a maniac. I’m a maniac as it is. I’d be nutty as hell without kids. I’d probably be dead.” Some admission. But he’s not wrong. It has to be all or nothing. And let’s be honest – does lasting success ever come any other way?

But where the public face of White has changed in the last year, making him more contained, is that he’s no longer the UFC’s front-of-house spokesman every other week. Stepping away from weekly sessions with the media, White discloses was not only strategic, but also a personal choice. 

“I stopped doing scrums for different reasons,” explains the 46-year-old. “They became ridiculous with the websites and all the stuff that was out there. They would twist words and only use certain things I said and take everything out of context to drag people to read the f**king story. If you didn’t read the story, you’d think that was what I really said. You read the story and it wasn’t even close to what I said. That got very tiring, so I stopped doing that.”

As for Rousey, who suffered her first loss at the biggest event in Octagon history in front of 56,214 fans in Melbourne, Australia, White could not be clearer in supporting the UFC’s leading star, or indeed his U-turn on women’s MMA that gave her and others the platform to shine. Rousey’s rise has mirrored the zeitgeist of women shouting out over their rights. It is vindication, moreover, than White’s gift for having his finger on the pulse has not left him.

Despite her November defeat to Holly Holm, Rousey’s reach from fight sports to Hollywood movies, on final analysis, could end up with "Rowdy" having a greater impact on society than just the commercial combat arena and pay-per-view sales. Like Muhammad Ali was a symbol for African-Americans, perhaps.

White agrees: “Ronda is the one athlete from this sport who will move on to do amazing and incredible things. Ali was very good for African Americans and civil rights and a lot of things that went on at that time. But I think Ronda will do big, big things. Every day when I wake up she’s bigger and bigger. It’s insane.”

On the subject of fighters, there’s Jon Jones too. The former light heavyweight champion returns next year, and White believes Jones 2.0 may be a very different animal, and potentially one who competes up at heavyweight. 

“The one thing you need to know and care about Jon Jones is that he’s probably the greatest talent to walk through the doors of the UFC. If he does the right things and doesn’t implode, who knows what that guy is capable of doing, especially now he’s taking it seriously,” Dana says.

“Jon’s a very controversial figure now. He’s either going to be your type of thing or not. He can really do whatever he wants to at this point. He’s talented and big enough to do it. Maybe that’s why he’s hitting the weights so hard these days. Have you seen those pictures of how he looks physically? Maybe he is thinking about moving to heavyweight.”

But other issues burn within White, and his relentless pursuit of pioneering change: digitally, financially, commercially and fight-wise. But it all goes back to what made him, and what defines him now. It’s all about evolution wrapped around a growing tree, and his own blue-collar roots.

Like Rousey, Jones, and indeed White himself, the UFC juggernaut is an ever-evolving beast. White may not be answering media questions on an event-by-event basis at present, but he reveals that behind the scenes, he is busier than ever. That ambition of making mixed martial arts the biggest sport on the planet burns as brightly as it ever did.

Evolution, he says, is the name of the UFC game: “It’s always going to be evolving, whether we’re talking about the fighters and the way they train and fight, or whether it’s the UFC and the new things we’re working on, whether it’s media platforms changing or new stuff we’re working on creatively. It’s always going to be like that,” he explains.

“We continue to do groundbreaking stuff that nobody has done before and everyone’s copying us. If you look at boxing now, and look at what these guys are doing on social media, they’re copying everything we do. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but we’re out there doing things people have never done before. 

“When I did 'Embedded,' that was a combination of my video blogs and the other show we used to do, except we changed the whole format and went with 'Embedded.' We’re very focused on that. Whatever’s next is what we’re looking for. We’ve always been like that and that’s the way we’ll always be. We don’t ever really have a break. We’re always working.”

White is a workaholic, driven by the fight promotion that has defined his adult life. “I get my kids (sons Dana, 14, Aidan, 13, and daughter Savannah, 9) ready and then drive them to school, then go to the gym, work out, and I’m in the office until it ends.”

The gym for him is about health, but part solace, one suspects. “In the morning I do cardio. I box. I lift weights. I work out with Skipper Kelp (a former pro welterweight boxer with a 24-4-1 record). Then I go to work.” And his days whizz by. “As soon as my foot walks in that f**king door, it’s f**king crazy. The day goes by in minutes. There are days when I have seven meetings scheduled. It’s insane, we’re so busy,” he says. 

But White does reflect more these days, on the relationship with his two sons, which leads him to think about the one he had with his own father. “It’s amazing the stuff you remember. My dad was a big drinker. It was rare that I saw him sober. He didn’t live with us. He’d show up drunk and was a bad drinker. It was a horrible feeling. I remember the smell, everything from it.”

It left an impact. “My kids never see me drunk. The only time my kids see me drinking is in Maine (at large family gatherings where he has another home). It makes me wonder because my kids didn’t grow up like that, will they get drunk in front of their kids because they don’t understand?”

He recalls his teenage years and one particular parental experience. “The only thing in my f**king life that my old man did for me was this: I tried to start smoking cigarettes and the old guy shows up out of f**king nowhere and beat the living s**t out of me because I was smoking. He brings me in the kitchen and made me smoke the whole f**king pack of cigarettes. We never did that again. That was the end of that. The beating wasn’t as bad as smoking the whole pack of cigarettes. I was sick for two days after.”

He’s on a roll now. Talking about hard work, and the new generation. Hard work has defined him. At the start, he enthused business partner Lorenzo Fertitta to buy the UFC. White never tired of banging on doors and desks of television companies telling them they would be signing with a no-brainer success story. He was right. Look at the $700 million, seven-year Fox Sports deal. It’s changed the landscape. 

“It’s what’s scary about this new society, this new generation. They want everything for f**king nothing. They think everything should be free. Believe me, I have been teaching my kids about work ethic.” Relentless again – at home, in the office, in the burgeoning global franchises.

White has admitted in the past he “barely made it through high school.” Yet teenage Dana already knew what he wanted to do: transform fight sports, in one form or another. So he tried everything, from boxing, training boxers, managing them, but never judging – we know what Dana thinks of judging. Once the UFC was within his grasp, he was like a Rottweiler with a bone.

He’s not averse to his own sons joining the family business. “It’s really in high school when you start breaking out and becoming who you are. We’ll figure out who they are in high school and whoever they are, I’m cool with it. Lorenzo’s oldest son, Lorenzo, now comes home from school and sits in meetings. He was there all summer sitting in meetings.”

He has re-focused more than ever before. New projects, now. There are new UFC plans underfoot, new details to be worked out, a new "UFC Campus" in Las Vegas to be built, housing a rehab center, gyms, offices, studios.

And there are new projects of his own, like the "Looking For a Fight" reality series. There is more to come, too, he promises, currently in the planning process. “Lorenzo needed help with stuff that was going on in the office, so we’ve just been digging in and working on different things. I’ve been working on a lot of creative s**t, stuff that’s going to shake it up. You don’t need me out doing press conferences all the time. 

“We changed the whole format. Now the fighters have their (media day) scrum and then there are face-offs, and that’s it. There’s nothing to ask me. In the beginning, it was different. Then, the whole dynamic was different.”

The pilot for his new show was universally well received, a concept that involved White going out on the road with the effervescent Matt Serra, the former UFC welterweight champion, and school friend Nick "The Tooth" Gullo. The pilot unearthed, of course, Sage Northcutt, the teenage Dolph Lundgren lookalike who has already made waves in the UFC.

White says: “We had a lot of fun. We left and had no idea what was going to happen when we went out. I put that show together, and I’m working on another show right now. That’s what I’ve been doing. We went out, we did the pilot for 'Looking for a Fight,' which was a huge success, and now you’ve got to get into budgets and figure out.”

Typically, White wouldn’t allow the show to be shoehorned onto any one television platform: “I didn’t want to put it on TV, I wanted to put it on the internet. We own everything we do. But I want the whole world to be able to see it. And I want to keep it real. 

“That whole Matt Serra scene at the end wouldn’t have played out right on TV. There would have been beeps everywhere and you wouldn’t have understood what was being said. Instead of millions of people seeing it, a few hundred thousand would have seen it.”

Clearly, White has returned to his roots. To the roots of fight and the things that made him. And perhaps the thing he is best at – watching, assessing and signing fighters. “I was talking to an old friend of mine from back when I worked construction in Boston, and he said to me, ‘You know what, man, you used to say this is what you were going to do back then and you f**king did it. I’m so happy for you and so proud of you.’ This is what I’ve been saying I’d do since I was a f**king kid,” explains White. “It’s so weird and so crazy. This is what I love to do. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

One thing underpins everything, White never forgets those who supported him. Like fighting legend Chuck Liddell, who has a job for life with the UFC. It will be no different with Rousey, he adds. If she finishes her career after a handful of fights, he will always be there for her. 

“There’s no such thing as too soon. There is such thing as too late. I think that Ronda will never leave the UFC. No matter what Ronda does for the rest of her life, she’ll always be associated with the UFC.”

White returns to one of the reasons for spending so much more time in the Zuffa office – that ‘UFC Campus.’ “We’re building a campus. It will make the office more efficient. There are scattered bodies everywhere. Here, across the road, where we’re leasing buildings. Now we’re going to reel it all in, bring it together, make it more efficient and make it so there’s a lot more interaction and more of a unit. We’re building a sick gym facility for fighters and a rehab center. It’s going to be the best rehab center on the West Coast. Maybe the best in all of sports.”

White rewinds. “Let’s say Tom Brady blows his ACL. What the Patriots don’t do is send Tom Brady somewhere back home and say, ‘Hey, let us know when your knee is fixed.’ They’re on top of it. They have the facility and everything for him to make his comeback. 

“Again, that’s how we’re taking this game to another level. We’re going to have a facility where our fighters can come and get the best possible therapy and recovery with us. The Ultimate Fighter might be there, too. The whole campus is going to be massive. It’s going to have restaurants for the employees and places to work out in the back. It’s going to be cool.”

Roots and evolution. The mantras of successful business leadership. “The first 10 or 12 years of this thing was hitting the pavement, spreading the word, getting out there and building. Now it’s time to reel back in and dig inside the company and take everything to the next level.” 

The great literary wordsmith Samuel Johnson once wrote: “The future is purchased by the present.” And right now, the living embodiment of that universal truth is Dana White.