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Last month, Dana White revealed during an interview with LVSportsBiz Guerrilla Cross Radio that he had signed a new contract with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, extending his tenure as the president of the organization for another 10 years.
It’s hard to fathom the UFC without White at its helm, which is probably why this news didn’t seem to generate much media buzz. Even though for a while there it looked like the 49-year-old had mentally checked out following the sale of the organization to Endeavor, in the last 18 months he has hit the reset button, looking and sounding like the old Dana again -- bullish, passionate and profane -- at press conferences and other appearances. Barring a force majeure event, he will continue in that role until 2029, after which he hopes to partner up with the Fertitta brothers in running an NFL team.
It’s not surprising that Endeavor wish to keep White around. For all of his flaws -- and we’ll get to those in a moment -- White is regarded by most as the most successful and influential MMA promoter in history, and it is hard to imagine the meteoric ascent of the sport in America without his involvement. It was Dana, armed only with his work ethic, street smarts and several tens of millions of dollars that took the UFC from a fledgling, near-bankrupt property of the Sephamore Entertainment Group to a financial and cultural juggernaut under the Fertittas, and the mythology surrounding him remains a significant factor in the UFC’s cultural relevance today.
White was, and to an extent remains, a sports executive singularly defined by his propensity for confrontation. In the debut season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” he stood down a picket line of fighters wishing to be compensated for their exhibition bouts by repeatedly shouting the phrase “Do you want to be a f—king fighter?” setting a mold for the company’s labor relations philosophy that remains 14 years later. Opposite critical members of the fledgling MMA media, White used his platform to disparage and degrade, pulling credentials for perceived slights and earning a reputation for holding a colossal grudge. Against the UFC’s many competitors, White went to war, verbally lambasting those organizations in the public, making threats behind closed doors and ruthlessly counter-programming their events. He saved his most brutal treatment for recalcitrant stars -- Randy Couture, B.J. Penn and Fedor Emelianenko among them.
Back then, White was masterful in conscripting these incidents into a grander “us-and-them” narrative, made easier by the fact that MMA was still experiencing growing pains and had no shortage of detractors. To the unassuming fight fan, there wasn’t necessarily a big difference between a fighter like Tito Ortiz demanding a larger share of the pay-per-view and a state senator lobbying against the legalization of MMA in New York, and White had an unparalled ability to sell the financial interests of the UFC and the interests of the sport more broadly as one and the same. Fighters who challenged the “800-pound gorilla” were accused of putting themselves before the MMA movement, and many have attested to the Trump-esque power White has wielded through his Twitter handle.
That penchant for hyperbole, two-facedness and ruthlessness -- arguably three of the most important prerequisites to becoming a successful fight promoter -- combined with White’s natural charisma and accommodating nature when it came to uncritical media coverage gave him an enormous level of influence over the MMA subculture. Indeed, White was perhaps one of the sport’s most valuable media properties over the company’s early days, underscored by his starring role in the UFC’s reality programming and press events.
As time has passed, White has remained front and center of the company, but while the UFC’s profits are ostensibly healthy, his status as an asset to the brand -- and to MMA more broadly -- is less clear. On an increasing list of issues, White has gone against the grain of fans, fighters and common sense for reasons that he either hasn’t bothered to communicate or seem directly connected to his ego, and as the UFC tries to appeal to a broader audience, his unfiltered, tough-guy persona simply isn’t the selling point that it once was.
In November, it was the shambolic UFC 230 card, with White going to extraordinary lengths to avoid putting Nate Diaz in a headlining spot despite overwhelming fan demand and the dearth of alternative options. So determined was White not to put the recalcitrant Stockton slugger in the main event role that he briefly inserted Sijara Eubanks -- a fighter so anonymous that UFC broadcaster Joe Rogan had never even heard of her -- in his place, before fans successfully talked him down from the ledge and an injured Daniel Cormier rode in on a white horse to save the show.
A few weeks later, White starred in a propaganda documentary, “Combatant in Chief,” that explicitly aligned the UFC’s brand with that of President Trump’s and vastly overstated the latter’s role in bringing MMA out of the dark ages. Such a move has no historical precedent in other major sports, and defied the conventional (if somewhat artificial) separation of sport and politics in the most divisive way possible.
At the beginning of the year, White crudely defended the placement of (alleged) domestic violence perpetrator Greg Hardy on the same card as domestic violence survivor Rachael Ostovich. The move was widely censured in the media and some of the UFC’s own, but White dogmatically asserted that “nobody cared” and when scrutinised for his decision during a press scrum, he threatened to walk.
Over at least the last 12 months, White has defined himself in staunch opposition to a recalibration of weight classes to include a 165-pound division and 175-pound division, despite near unanimous support for the proposal by fighters and regulators. His reasoning, that it would dilute the talent pool at lightweight and welterweight, is in direct contradiction to the introduction of the female flyweight division last year, which he oversaw and promoted.
It would be easy to continue listing off the ways that White has appeared as more of a liability than an asset in recent years, but the fact remains that his status in the top-job has never been more secure. He has the greenlight to steward the UFC through its next growth phase in Russia and China, currying favor with dictators on one hand and selling Gay Pride t-shirts in the other. He will continue to treat fighters largely according to his personal feelings towards them, and shout down media and fans who disagree with his decision-making.
The higher-ups at Endeavor and ESPN seem to be OK with this. We have 10 more years to figure out if it was the right call.