UFC | Liddell Ortiz | Boston | Dana | Vegas | boxing

"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.