BLACK & WHITE (AND BLUE)
THANKS TO DANA WHITE, ARMED WITH SAVVY AND MORE THAN A LITTLE SALTY LANGUAGE, ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP HAS OVERTAKEN BOXING AS THE BIGGEST FIGHT GAME AROUND. NOW IT’S COMING FOR THE OTHER PRO SPORTS LEAGUES. BY JOHN GONZALEZ. PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRAD HINES.
It is a few hours before UFC 62 at Mandalay Bay — a fight that will pit Chuck Liddell, the biggest star in mixed martial arts and the reigning light heavyweight champion, against someone who everyone expects will get knocked out quickly, but in grand, wholly entertaining fashion. Liddell’s opponent is a guy named Renato Sobral. People call him Babalu. I have no idea why, but, then, it doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that, despite Babalu’s having won his last 10 fights, people are eagerly anticipating his destruction at the hands of the
Mohawk-sporting, seemingly untouchable, and completely compelling Liddell.
There’s a buzz in the casino that’s a little louder, a little more palpable than normal; mixed among the flashing lights and ding-ding-ding of slot machines are breathless conversations anticipating tonight’s fight and the impending carnage. In general, Las Vegas is insane. A good time, but insane. Now, shortly before various combatants pound each other with merciless kicks, unrepentant elbows, and vicious punches, the city is so charged that it’s almost too much to handle, even for me. And I come here all the time.
So when I get a phone call from Ultimate Fighting Championship’s public relations person, who tells me that my interview with Dana White has been moved to a different location and a different time, I’m not surprised. White, after all, is the president of UFC, a man in constant motion. I can only imagine that, right now, he’s addressing myriad concerns: discussing commercials, signing off on production elements, handling fighters, running his staff ragged. This is what he does on a day-to-day basis. This is why he and UFC are so successful now, why the brand has a choke hold on the coveted 18-to-34 demographic. White is, if nothing else, an accomplished businessman who took UFC from nearly defunct — from nearly outlawed — to a sport that’s all the rage.
When I first met White, about six months ago, he barely stopped to breathe. He was in meetings all day, and in between, he ran errands. I was totally convinced that he was undead, some sort of B-movie creature destined to roam the earth without need for sleep or food. Which is why it’s so surprising that, when our rescheduled meeting happens, it’s at a restaurant where, gasp, he actually stops to sit and, you know, eat. Physically, he looks the same — clean-shaven head and a stocky (solid, not fat) build that’s hidden beneath a black polo, a long-sleeved white shirt, and faded jeans.
There’s something different, though: He looks happy. Not that he didn’t look happy before — the man presides over a multimillion-dollar corporation and takes home millions himself (I assume; the UFC is notoriously cryptic about its earnings, and so is White). What’s not to be happy about? Except that the man deals with fighters, and he has a lot to oversee in terms of everyday operations, so the first time around, he seemed maybe not stressed but definitely preoccupied.
“Things are really good. Really good,” the 37-year-old White assures me. He has a wide smile, and his eyes are all lit up. He looks a little like a kid who’s been given unfettered access to the cookie jar. The only things missing are some chocolate smudges in the corners of his mouth. “Think about it. Sportswriters have tunnel vision. For a long time, they would cover only the major four sports: football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. We’ve done better numbers than basketball, baseball, hockey. It’s not like it’s cricket or polo. We said all along that we wanted to build this thing up to where we can’t be denied or ignored. Well, guess what? It’s hard to ignore us now.”
Here’s where I have to be honest. This is not the real Dana White. It’s mostly Dana White — you’re getting the charisma, the savvy. You’re getting the hustle and an understanding of how he worked his way up from nothing into something; how he and his partners (Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, who own the Station Casinos conglomerate) built an absolute monster sports company. All of that is real. All of that is White. But it’s not White the way he prefers to be seen, unvarnished and uncensored. If it were, the story would read something like this:
“[Bleep] [bleep], you know?” White might say. “And may I add, [bleep].”
And so on. That’s how it would probably go.
The grit is part of his charm, part of his story, part of what makes him so very real — that he’s a kid from Boston who became an unmitigated success, that he’s evolved even if his choice of words never has. He curses. A lot — a fact he is well aware of. “Really, can I be in an airline magazine?” he jokes, referring to his often blue lexicon. I tell him he can but that I’ll have to redact the racy parts. (Use your imagination and sprinkle a few, or a bunch of, throaty curse words into the rest of his quotes.)
“He’s a great guy, but he’s not going to pussyfoot around,” says Forrest Griffin, who will fight on the UFC 62 undercard and who, like Liddell, is a hugely popular figure in the sport. “Dana lays it out there. He can be harsh. He doesn’t always pick his words carefully. It’s the truth, but he doesn’t always package it in a polite way. He tells it the way it is. Society in general — it’s not ‘you’re fired’; it’s ‘we’re going to have to let you go because we’re downsizing.’ Dana isn’t like that at all. But you know what? The way he is, the way he talks? It’s why we respect him. Look at what he’s done.”
White moved around a lot as a kid, hopping from Maine to Vegas to Boston and back. He went to UMass Boston (a satellite campus of the University of Massachusetts) for a while, but he didn’t last very long. School wasn’t for him, so he dropped out. Neither were the sundry jobs that he worked to pay the bills while he was trying to figure out exactly what he wanted to do with his life. He hauled cement for a construction company. He was a bouncer at a bar. He was a doorman at a hotel. None of them felt like his life’s work, the kind of thing you just know you’re put on the earth to do. He’d always been a fight fan, though, and one day he decided to take boxing lessons. He was a quick study. Before long, he was giving the instruction rather than taking it, and he started a youth program in Boston. What it really taught him, though, was that he wanted to be involved in the business side of boxing, in the fight promotion.
When White was 26, he moved to Vegas and opened a gym. He started working with Liddell and Tito Ortiz, another guy who’s a boldfaced name in the UFC. Before long, he and some high school friends, the Fertittas, had purchased the nearly defunct UFC — a fight organization that some states were banning and that couldn’t even get on pay-per-view. Read that again. When White came along, UFC couldn’t even get on something you have to pay to see.
“I spent my first few years screaming at people over the phone and threatening to sue them,” White says. “It was horrible.”
Through patience and a series of deft moves, like embracing the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s rules (weight classes, fight doctors, no more head-butting), White transformed UFC from something resembling Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (two men enter; one man leaves!) to a legitimate sport broadcast on Spike TV and pay-per-view, with an ever-expanding fan base and sanctioning in major states that also allow boxing (including California and
New Jersey).
“If it weren’t for Dana White, there’s no way this sport would be even close to where it is now,” says color commentator Joe Rogan. Yes, that Joe Rogan, from Fear Factor. Trust me, he’s much funnier and erudite than you might expect. “No one else would have had the dedication to stick with it. No one else would have brought it to where it is.”
Today, Ultimate Fighting Championship is a huge brand that regularly outpaces other sports organizations. The fourth-season premiere of The Ultimate Fighter (UFC’s reality show, a masterstroke that has built faceless fighters into recognizable, marketable stars) destroyed a baseball game on ESPN that same night. Among men ages 18 to 49, 1.1 million viewers tuned in to watch UFC, as opposed to the 239,000 who decided to watch baseball. But the true test, the real apples-to-apples comparison, comes against boxing. UFC 61 sold out the Mandalay Bay; 12,400 people attended, with ringside seats going for as much as $750. Conversely, one of the biggest boxing fights of the year happened at almost the same time: “Sugar” Shane Mosley fought Fernando Vargas at the MGM Grand. That fight drew fewer than 10,000; the most expensive tickets went for $800. You may not think that’s a huge win for UFC, but it is. For a sport that was marginalized, UFC is not only being taken seriously now but is also excelling.
“When I first started, we were averaging five fights a year,” White says. “Last year, we had 19. This year, we’re looking at somewhere between 23 and 25. We’re opening an office in London. We’re continuing to grow, and our programming is getting stronger. It’s because people like our product.”
That is largely due to the fact that UFC has built its fighters into personalities. UFC uses The Ultimate Fighter (as well as other programming) to create names and build brands. They may need to work on their nicknames (they have fighters called the Hungarian Nightmare and the People’s Warrior), but despite that, UFC has big-time talent whom people pay to see. Rich Franklin. Matt Hughes. Forrest Griffin. Chuck Liddell. Tito Ortiz. These are fighters whom fans not only know but also adore, and there are more of them. (Come up with five big-name boxers right now, and then ask yourself if you’d pay to see them. Didn’t think so.)
Those who cover the sport and those who attend are proof of UFC’s pop-culture relevance, that the fighters and the fights are significant now. Outlets that wouldn’t have even mentioned UFC five years ago now regularly write about it, including the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, the Miami Herald, et al. The big Mike Tyson fight used to be the draw of the year in Vegas. Now Tyson himself attends UFC events. So do Shaq, Tim Duncan, Paris Hilton, and Leonardo DiCaprio. At one fight, I went to the bathroom and stood next to Lee Majors. The Fall Guy!
“Look,” White says, “you can go to a Lakers game, but you’re never going to meet Kobe. You can go to a football game, but you’re never going to meet your favorite player. This sport is accessible. That’s what we’re selling. I guarantee you that if you come to one of our fights or to a weigh-in, you’re gonna get an autograph or a picture with your favorite fighter. And we’re gonna keep it that way.”
I tried. I really did. But despite my best efforts to get White to tell me about the downside of success, about the rival leagues that want to steal some of UFC’s cachet, about the fighters who want more money, about the online detractors who say disparaging things about him and the company from the shadowy recesses of the Internet, he wouldn’t budge. What can I say? As previously noted, he’s a hard case. This is the closest I came:
“We’re not mainstream yet,” White says. “We’re not there — yet. We have so much time and opportunity to grow. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Really? I’m not so sure.
As I walked back to my hotel after UFC 62, after Liddell had demolished Sobral in a first-round knockout, people at the craps table stopped to ask passersby if they had been at the fight and, if so, who’d won. Even the pit bosses stopped. Pit bosses and craps tables wouldn’t stop for a SWAT raid. The next morning, bleary-eyed, I left for the airport at about five — long before the sun had come up and before my brain had switched on. My cab driver, on the other hand, was impossibly perky for such an unsavory hour and began peppering me with questions about my time in Vegas. He told me everything about him, including that he had just moved to the States from Sri Lanka. All I told him was that I was in town to cover UFC.
Suddenly, it was like he was possessed. He turned almost completely around and ignored the road altogether. “Who won the fight last night?” he asked breathlessly.