Dana White

Dana White (born July 28, 1969) is the current President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts organization based in the United States.

White in London, 2015

Quotes

• It isn't all about signing autographs and banging broads.
  • Dana White, The Ultimate Fighter, Season One of The Ultimate Fighter (2005).

• My point is, any of you wanna win this fucking show, move on, take those fucking people out of the equation.
  • Dana White, The Ultimate Fighter, Season Nineteen, Episode Six, Fight to Live (2014).

Dana White and the future of UFC (2004)

Wickert, Marc. 2004. Dana White and the future of UFC. fighttimes.com

• Actually, the father of mixed martial arts, if you will, was Bruce Lee. If you look at the way Bruce Lee trained, the way he fought, and many of the things he wrote, he said the perfect style was no style. You take a little something from everything. You take the good things from every different discipline, use what works, and you throw the rest away.

• I boxed in the amateurs before getting into submission fighting and got hooked. Actually, I owned three boxing gyms in Vegas. I trained and managed fighters and had a sports management company. One day I met Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell, who I started representing, and I got into this huge contract negotiation with Bob Meyerwitz, the former owner of Tito Ortiz’s contract. Through that, Bob and I developed a mutual respect for one another.

• Lorenzo Fertitta was a good friend of mine since we were kids. He and I were going to do something together in boxing anyway, so I called Lorenzo - he was down in Miami - and I said, ‘You know what, I just found out the UFC is for sale. What do you think?’ And he said, ‘That’s interesting.'

• No doubt about it. The reality is, there’s nothing fake, obviously, like pro wrestling, and it is the most hard-core, full-contact event in the world.

• UFC is also safer than boxing because of the tap-out rule. I'll give you an example: when Roberto Duran said, 'No mas' (meaning 'no more' in Spanish) because he couldn't continue and knew he was hurt, he was ridiculed the rest of his career. In UFC, a fighter can tap out if he's in a dangerous position or believes he's going to be seriously injured.

• UFC is definitely a younger guy’s sport. Our target audience is anywhere from age 17 to 35. And our fighters will be household names. Where I’d like to see it is like it is in Japan right now. We were just over there [on August 10, 2003] with Chuck Liddell, who was representing UFC in a UFC versus PRIDE fight. And he knocked out Alistair Overeem in the first round [3:09] of the PRIDE Grand Prix Elimination tournament. That was awesome, man. Chuck couldn’t leave the place on Monday morning. He went to go shopping, to buy some things for his family, and he was swarmed for forty-five minutes. The mall security had to pull him out of there and throw him in a car. There were thirty seven thousand people at the event, and it was the first time the tournament was shown on free TV. So millions of people saw him fight that night – not only in Japan, but in the US.