Dana White’s foray into boxing with Turki Alalshikh and the UFC’s parent company, the TKO Group Holdings, has made it to the news more often than he would have liked. While it has primarily been criticized for an alleged attempt to bring the UFC paygrade into pugilism and the perceived tampering of the Ali Act, there’s also a growing notion among loyal fans regarding its ‘guaranteed’ success.
The reason- UFC boss Dana White. When White and the Fertitta brothers took over the UFC in 2001, it had cost them $2 million. And even with that sum of money, they didn’t get everything they needed.
“When we bought this company for $2 million, we literally bought an old wooden octagon, we had three letters ‘UFC’ and like 12-15 contracts, right?”, he had revealed. The former owners had sold all the ancillary rights away to Lionsgate. Thankfully, White negotiated a $3 million deal.
From there, growing a once-faltering sport into a billion-dollar industry where MMA is synonymous with the brand UFC took something special, something that the NBA and NFL arguably couldn’t have achieved- not if basketball and football were only legal in two states when they took over.
So, when in a Bloomberg interview from 2022, White was asked how different he was from NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NFL commissioner Roger Goddell, the UFC boss admitted it call came down to who makes the call.
“I think the big difference in what makes us, I wouldn’t say better but easier to manage than those things is that there’s one guy that makes all the decisions, and that’s me“, he said.
Emphasizing the importance of his iron fist approach to the business, he added, “When I want to do something, we are doing it“.
And sure, these statements can be classified as supercilious, but then again, the UFC boss’ decisions to keep the shop open during the pandemic meant no UFC employee was laid off.
White ‘stayed on business’ during COVID
“It’s one thing I am most proud of, out of my whole 20-year career in the UFC“, White admitted.
Furthermore, the company also managed to honor all its fighter contracts. “Everybody made a living and got paid through COVID“, he added with a sense of satisfaction.
It also helped that the UFC was the only sporting event, other than soccer, on TV. The promotion gained a serious number of new followers in the absence of a viable alternative, the UFC boss claimed.
“People tuned in, and people watched. We gained a lot of fans because there was nothing to gamble on. So, SportsBetter started betting on the UFC”, he noted.
“And if you are going to watch the UFC, you are going to end up loving it. There’s no way that it isn’t exciting to you and not fun to watch”, White told Bloomberg. And ain’t that the truth!
