"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.)