Blood sport: how Dana White turned the UFC into a $4bn titan
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Each week, Dana White walks into the executive kitchen next to his office to eat some grotesquerie dreamt up by his chefs. Today they present the Ultimate Fighting Championship chief with a “doughnut grilled cheese”. This was prepared by slicing a glazed doughnut in half, buttering each side, putting a slice of American cheese in the middle and sautéing it. White is excited by the culinary creativity but, after one bite, he shakes his bald head into his social media guy’s phone and says: “I don’t love it. One and done. No bueno.”
Several employees in the executive kitchen beg him to reconsider. White’s enormous bouncer body resists any halt in forward momentum, but he manages to stay put. He loves these chefs, great guys, so sure, OK, one more try. The chefs fry him a fresher, hotter, meltier grilled cheese doughnut. White bites into the new one and agrees it’s better. But he tells the social media guy to post the “no bueno” video. It’s Fuck It Friday, not Nuanced Deliberation Friday.
There’s no other president of a sports league who is the face of his brand like White is. No network is trying to get Premier League CEO Richard Masters to host a reality show but, according to White, the Food Network has signed up for eight episodes of Fuck It Friday. White’s already a TV star, having hosted The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show that now airs on BT Sport, ESPN+ and Hulu, since 2005. It’s so popular it’s accompanied by Dana White’s Contender Series, in which he looks for even less seasoned fighters to recruit.
Over the past two decades, White built the UFC into a $4bn company that made more than $1bn in revenue in the past year. The company has a seven-year deal with ESPN that landed it $1.5bn, before lucrative pay-per-view rights. In March, the UFC sold out London’s O2 arena with a $4.3mn gate, the venue’s record for a sporting event, then topped it again in July. This Saturday, after winning a decades-long battle to make mixed martial arts (MMA) events legal in France, White will host his first event in Paris.
Unlike most corporate leaders, he did all of this by cursing at press conferences, threatening adversaries and publicly trashing the weaknesses of his workers, the fighters.
It may seem like White, 53, is the beneficiary of a world that’s become more crude, more combative, more individualistic, more honest. A world where honour culture is ascendant. A world where Oscar winners slap presenters on live TV, the richest person in the world challenges the president of Russia to a fight and strongmen have taken over countries from El Salvador to Hungary and the Philippines. A world becoming more and more like him every day.
That is not what happened.
What happened was that White made the world more like him. He did this not by ordering around employees and imposing his will. He did it through enthusiasm. This is White’s great talent. He can transfer his immense excitement to others with almost no loss of energy. “Even pre-UFC, anything Dana did or bought, he could convince you it’s the greatest thing in the world. To him it is. He’s not manipulating you. When they were in Greece, I asked, ‘How was it?’ and he went on this tirade about how it’s the best place he’s ever been and ate the best chicken he ever had. It could be an auto body shop in LA. It’s everything,” says his younger sister Kelly. It’s not a sales technique he turns on and off. “He is 100 per cent like that all the time.”
When Dwayne Johnson flew to Minneapolis years ago to watch a UFC fight, White asked The Rock why he wasn’t on social media. “I was saying, ‘I don’t see the value. I see people tweeting about what kind of hamburger they had.’ Dana turned to me and said, ‘You have got to engage in social media. It will be one of the greatest things for your business.’ And I started to laugh because he was so serious.” White insisted Johnson meet his social media consultant. “Ten years later, I am, fortunately, the most-followed American man in the world,” Johnson says.
Around the same time, White convinced me it was key to my writing career, and my life, to have a Muay Thai trainer kick me, which taught me the valuable lesson that being kicked in the leg by a professional leg kicker hurts. I regretted it instantly. Yet a few hours later, he convinced me to let former UFC fighter John Lewis choke me out until I was unconscious. Twice.
Now he’s pumped to show me a stare-down, the pre-fight ritual where UFC combatants stand inches away from each other and make tough faces for the cameras like they’re 1980s cologne models. It looks like a vestigial, fist-shaking marketing stunt from a pre-television era. But White tells me it’s his second-favourite part of fight week, after the fight itself, which is a big statement because he has so many favourite parts. And this time will be even better, if that’s possible, because he gets to see me experience it for the first time.
So I’m following White through a crowd, past security guards, up on to the stage of the theatre in the Park MGM hotel in Las Vegas. We head to centre stage, in front of ring card girls in Monster Energy drink-branded bikinis and tiny belts that are not holding anything up. Soon, I am a few inches between the faces of shirtless UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski and his shirtless opponent, Brian Ortega. “How cool is this?” White asks, in a way that is not at all a question. And it is indeed very cool.
From here, I can see that the stare-down isn’t performative. Volkanovski and Ortega are scanning for weakness. They provoke reactions in each other to add to their data dumps. Sometimes the algorithms demand even more information and fighters start punching each other, which White is excited might happen here.
Volkanovski has been insulting Ortega since they were guest coaches on The Ultimate Fighter. Which is why White thinks that show is so much better than The Real Housewives. “You see all these reality shows, but you never get to see them fight,” he says to me, as if dissecting story problems in a script. But as much as he would personally enjoy it, he doesn’t want these two guys to fight right now, because they could get hurt and cancel the event they’re promoting. Plus, not stopping fighters from going at it outside regulated bouts is unprofessional. It happened a week before at a weigh-in for a Showtime boxing match, which White cites as another example of how boxing has devolved: “I’ve been shitting on Showtime all week. I’d better not fuck this one up.”
It looks like he might. As cameras flash, Volkanovski taunts Ortega. “You look a little nervous. You look a little shook,” he says. Ortega, his camouflage baseball hat on backwards, shakes his head, no, he’s not nervous. But his eyes look crazed due to days of near-dehydration to make his weight class, so when he feints towards Volkanovski to show he’s not scared, the tattoo of a hissing serpent that runs down Volkanovski’s arm pops, and I jump backwards.
White leans in. “I’m a little nervous. I’m a little shook,” he says to the fighters, laughing. He gently separates them with his thick arms. He pats me on the shoulder, thrilled for my luck at witnessing this alpha flexing. And I do feel lucky. All the animosity that’s muted and suppressed in other sports is alive here. White has always loved fighting. He’s always believed everyone loves fighting. His job was merely to remind them. Which, in 2001, when White took over a failing niche spectacle, seemed utterly idiotic.
When I was in elementary school, my dad, who boxed in college and in the army, would watch fights on Friday nights. I hated them. I couldn’t comprehend how such barbarism was still permitted in a society so civilised that I played video games instead of getting my clothes dirty playing sports. I was proven right. After Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997, boxing became too barbaric for the mainstream. In a 2006 Gallup poll, only 2 per cent of Americans named boxing as their favourite sport, fewer than picked figure skating.
Unlike me, White believed that boxing had a business problem, not a cultural one. People in every part of the world, he says, still stop whatever they’re doing any time a fight breaks out to watch. Admiring someone who can beat someone else up is built into our DNA, he insists. Which is why White believed mixed martial arts (MMA) would be popular in every country. There are no rules to learn, no history to appreciate. “The UFC is like Andy Warhol. Cricket is Mark Rothko. Everybody gets Andy Warhol. With Rothko, the entrée is so hard,” says Lawrence Epstein, UFC’s chief operating officer. A former lawyer, Epstein met White when he took his boxing workout class in the 1990s.
Even as White was teaching Las Vegans to jab and cross, he believed fighting would make a comeback. He says there are three main types of people in the world: nerds, jocks and stoners, none of whom truly understand the others. There’s also a small fourth group: fighters. They’re outsiders who lack social skills and operate on a base level. As a kid, he thought he might be one.
White was born in 1969 to a 19-year-old high-school dropout mom, who alleges her parents abused her, and a 21-year-old alcoholic dad. In her 2011 book, Dana White, King of MMA, June White describes her life as a teen this way: “Most of my acquaintances were a rogues’ gallery of gangsters, bank robbers, drug dealers . . . and gunrunners.” By the time Dana was eight, his dad had left the family.
Dana, according to his mom’s book, mostly excelled in getting in fights. Though that might be the author’s skewed perspective, because Dana’s fights are the accomplishments in which she expresses the most maternal pride. In her account, he’s always defending a woman’s reputation, his family name or a weaker victim. Ancient Romans were raised in less of an honour culture than Dana White.
After high school, White worked as a road paver, a bouncer, a hotel bellman and, eventually, became an apprentice boxing trainer in Boston. That’s when he met real fighters and realised he wasn’t one of them. He says he never looks at any UFC fighter and thinks he could take them: “Not even the girls.” White realised he was a jock. And, as countless movies have proved, jocks stop having a clear path after high school. White also learnt he wasn’t even a tough jock. When Whitey Bulger, the infamous mobster, had his men threaten White for not paying $2,500 in shakedown money at his gym, White hightailed to Nevada. His mom moved back too.
In Vegas, White’s boxing class became so popular he taught it in a massive gym that’s now the world’s largest strip club. He became a local celebrity and, by 2000, was managing two mixed martial artists who would go on to become huge stars, Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. White found himself fighting over the payout for a contract he had negotiated for Ortiz with a music promoter who had co-founded the UFC in 1993.
Like kids wondering which superhero would win in a fight, the UFC asked which martial arts discipline would dominate. But it wasn’t easy to promote, which was why the UFC hadn’t paid White’s fighters. White convinced Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta III, brothers he knew from high school, to buy the struggling outfit for $2mn. White had trained them and, after meeting a ju-jitsu fighter, all three learnt the discipline. The Fertittas figured it would be a fun side hustle to their hugely successful local casino business. They gave White 10 per cent of the company, made him president and signed a contract stating that if the siblings ever had a disagreement, they’d settle it on the ju-jitsu mat, with White as referee.
There are a lot of sleazy jobs in Vegas but, in 2001, owning the UFC might have been the most shameful. The sport was advertised with the slogan “There Are No Rules”, which was true, other than a ban on biting, eye-gouging and hitting your opponent in the balls. There were no rounds, time limits or judges. The only way to end a fight was knockout or surrender. Fighters fought in an octagon surrounded by black, chain-link fencing. There were no corners to escape to.
In 1996, senator John McCain, a huge boxing fan, had railed against the UFC on the floor of the US Senate, calling it “human cockfighting”, and sent letters to the governor of every state asking them to ban the sport. The American Medical Association recommended a ban as well. The UFC’s infamy was such a punchline that in a 1997 Friends episode Monica breaks up with her millionaire tech-mogul boyfriend because he has gone insane and joined the UFC, refusing to quit even after winding up in a full-body cast. White later said in an interview at Stanford Business School: “We bought a company that wasn’t allowed on pay-per-view. Porn is [on] pay-per-view.”
But White’s main problem was that no one, not even in Vegas, would let the UFC host a fight. Until February 23 2001, when UFC 30: Battle on the Boardwalk was held at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Donald Trump showed up for the first preliminary fight and stayed until the end, many hours later. They’ve been friends ever since, and White spoke at both the 2016 and 2020 Republican conventions.
Still, by 2004, White had lost his high-school friends $34mn. As a last-ditch effort, the trio pitched a reality show based on the UFC, getting it on the fledgling Spike TV channel only by offering to finance it themselves. The Ultimate Fighter premiered in 2005. Like The Real World, the show sequestered people in a house. Unlike most episodes of The Real World, it ended with two of them fighting. Some didn’t wait until the end of the episode. Welterweight Julian Lane would become famous in a later season for throwing a crying, wall-punching fit and yelling, “Let me bang, bro!” as housemates held him back. The final episode of the first season ended with a sanctioned fight between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar.
As it went on, viewers called friends exhorting them to tune in, until three million people were watching.
Two years after the Griffin-Bonnar fight, the UFC had gained enough credibility for a Sports Illustrated cover line to wonder “Ultimate Fighting: Too Brutal or The Future?” In 2016, the answer was clear when talent agency and media conglomerate Endeavor bought the company for $4bn, netting White $360mn. The deal stipulated he keep running the company. White’s contract was re-upped to 2026.
As the UFC got huge, White’s relationship with his mother fell apart. In her book, she writes things few mothers have ever said about their children, such as, “Dana went from being a true friend, a good son, and a truly nice person to being a vindictive tyrant who lacks any feeling for how he treats others.” She accuses him of cheating on his wife, accuses his wife of beating him and accuses him of beating a puppy. And of being financially ungenerous to herself and to White’s grandmother. White won’t discuss the claims.
By the time her book came out, both Dana and his sister Kelly weren’t talking to their mom. “We all were close. That’s the saddest part of it all,” Kelly says. “Dana never did anything to her. It makes no sense to me. I have heard several things from her saying he’s very selfish. I don’t know where she gets it from or who she’s speaking to, because he gives a lot to charity. I don’t know what her end game is. To not have a family?”
In that Tony-Soprano-love-your-difficult-mom kind of way, White has trouble saying anything bad about his mother. Which is telling because he doesn’t hold back on anyone else. He’s not afraid to take on his 670 active fighters, who are all contract workers. A 2021 survey by sports website The Athletic showed that only 6.5 per cent of MMA fighters don’t want to form a union. Which White is not about to let happen. Former fighter Cung Le is part of a potentially multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit that’s been working its way through the legal system since 2014. It accuses the UFC of being a monopsony — a market in which there is only one buyer — that vastly underpays its athletes. The case is likely to reach the US Supreme Court and be the first major monopsony ruling in the history of American law.
Whereas sports leagues such as the NFL, NBA and MLB have negotiated to give half of revenues to players, the UFC probably distributes about 17.5 per cent. “One of our clients was living in a garage over his mom’s house when he was a top UFC fighter. It’s brutal,” says Eric Cramer, chair of Berger Montague, the firm representing the fighters. (Payouts to fighters range from $10,000 to $20mn per fight.) “They’re not getting health insurance. They’re not being paid for their training. Their managers are not being paid. In boxing, it’s one promoter against another and they agree to fight. In the UFC, they decide, not you, who you fight and when you fight.” Cramer claims that fighters who don’t re-up their contracts on White’s terms are scheduled to fights designed to hurt their careers.
White, who hired superstar attorney David Boies’ firm to defend the UFC, dismisses every accusation. “That’s this huge paranoia with fighters, ‘You’re trying to get me beat,’” he says. “There are no easy fights here.” As for the fighters who took second jobs to make rent, as the lawsuit claims, White makes no apologies: “You’re either one of the top guys in the world or you’re not. The people in a type of lawsuit like that are the ‘or nots’.”
In addition to the lawsuit, White is being pressured by congressman Markwayne Mullin, who is likely to become a US senator next year. The Oklahoma Republican is a former MMA fighter who turned down appearing on The Ultimate Fighter when the UFC said he couldn’t make any outside calls during six weeks of filming, not even to run his plumbing company. He’s introduced a bill that would extend the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act to mixed martial arts. It would require an outside body to rank fighters, regardless of whether they were in the UFC or one of the much smaller MMA leagues. Top-ranked fighters would have to fight regardless of which league they joined, leading to more competition. Mullin believes that the UFC’s claim that fighters are independent contractors and not employees won’t hold up in court: “I’m a plumbing contractor, so I understand these contracts a little bit. If 100 per cent of your money is being earned by one place, you’re not a subcontractor.”
White says he’ll never let other people pick who fights, which he considers the most important part of his job. UFC commentator and former champion fighter Daniel Cormier remembers heading to a press conference right after defending the light heavyweight belt in Boston, tired and bruised. “I walked to the back room and Dana leans in and says, ‘What do you think about fighting Stipe Miocic in July and trying to become a double champion? I’ll call you Monday.’” Cormier was exhausted and didn’t want to talk about it, but White persisted, offering a healthy payout. “That was the most UFC way of doing things,” says Cormier. “He never stops. It’s constantly an assault on the world.”
White is so focused on arranging fights he doesn’t spend much time in his apartment-sized office. Which he can’t believe I’ve never seen. White leads me around, playing docent in what seems to be an art gallery designed to emasculate Damien Hirst. There’s a 17th-century samurai sword on the table and samurai armour in the corner. A sabre-toothed tiger skull. A Bruce Nauman painting that’s the sentence “Pay Attention Mother Fuckers” backwards. A rifle papier-mâchéd in American cash with bullets filled with blood, heroin, gold and diamonds. An enormous 1998 colour Nobuyoshi Araki photograph of the back of a tattooed yakuza gangster having sex with a naked woman, titled “Tattooed Fuck”, that he got when a friend called and said he had got him a gift, and then asked him to wire $200,000 for it without telling him what it was, which is a weird kind of gift, but White accepted it anyway. And when White saw it, he said, “I can’t display it! Women work here!” But then, you know, it’s art, so he did display it, and not one person has complained.
On another wall are two bass guitars signed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea that are actually painted by Hirst, who is, of course, a UFC fan. In the hallway outside, past the enormous pile of brass-knuckle paperweights, is a triptych of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse preparing for and fighting in the UFC octagon.
A door in his office leads to a short hall with a full bathroom, a Kardashian-sized walk-in closet filled with rare sneakers and hangers with the same T-shirt in every colour, and an enormous personal gym. As he continues the tour, he makes me read all the quotes painted on the gym wall from Bruce Lee and his good friend Mike Tyson (“Don’t be surprised if I behave like a savage. I am a savage”). And I should totally use the gym while I’m in town! Anytime, even the middle of the night when the office is closed. Before I can refuse, he has an assistant put me on a list to grant me complete access.
We go back to the office, but only to pass through on our way to another door that leads to White’s bar. Like a full-on sports bar. I need to try Howler Head, a bourbon that tastes like banana, and White knows what I’m thinking, but it’s not banana in a bad way, he promises. After shots of that, I need to try Teremana, The Rock’s tequila. He had it at dinner with Dwayne Johnson in New York right before lockdown, and it was so good that he insisted The Rock cut him in as an investor. Johnson, excited by White’s excitement, said yeah, absolutely. “Once I went back and I opened the Teremana books, I realised that there was really nothing to give,” says Johnson about the day after the dinner. No problem. Totally understand. White launched his own liquor, Howler Head.
White spends most of his time across the hall from this mansion of an office, in a crappy, windowless meeting room. One wall of the room has a map of the world. Another wall has a sign that says “Art of War” surrounded by national flags. The wall that matters is the wall with the lists. White sits here with chief business officer Hunter Campbell, senior vice-president of talent relations Sean Shelby and vice-president of talent relations Mick Maynard. And they make fights.
Every Monday, an independent body made up of MMA media and experts sends rankings of the top 15 fighters in each division, which are arranged on the wall. On Tuesdays at 1pm, and for the next three to six hours, the four men debate who should fight. “The most important question is ‘What does this fight mean?’” explains Campbell. “Why should people give a shit? What’s the storyline?” Viewers want to see an up-and-comer really tested by a veteran. Or they’ll want to match up two guys who used to train with the same coach, and now one had a falling out with him. It’s not the pure, number-three-fights-number-four system that congressman Mullin wants. It is a bit like a nonfiction version of the WWE, the massively popular American wrestling league with scripted melodrama. White insists that stories make the UFC successful.
White and Campbell then call fighters to see if they’re willing, healthy and able to come to a financial agreement. “Sometimes you have two guys in the top five you want to put in a fight, but their wives are best friends. Every day, even when I’m sleeping, my phone is blowing up with fights falling apart or people wanting to fight someone else. It’s fucking madness,” says Campbell.
Part of why making fights takes so long is that even though White has strong opinions, he’s a good listener. When White stops talking for more than a minute, his energy dissipates, and he seems to stop paying attention, possibly taking the micro-naps his body must require. But he’s absorbing information. White had long vowed to never let women fight but, after meeting with Olympic judo medallist Ronda Rousey in 2012, he changed his mind. Rousey became the highest-paid fighter on the UFC roster and an international movie star. Since women started fighting in 2013, they have been the top card at more than 40 fights. White might change his mind but, if he does, it’ll be quick. He’s the anti-Hamlet.
The last time White experienced a moment of doubt was in April 2020. He had gotten off the phone with Campbell and sat silently on the edge of his resort-sized pool, the one place he can get cell reception in the Vegas mansion he had built on the grounds of four multimillion-dollar homes. And he wondered if maybe he was the bad guy.
Every sport, every form of entertainment had shut down due to the pandemic. His bosses at Endeavor closed offices and cut staff. “I have no idea what’s going on. I’m basing the whole Covid thing by what happens to Tom Hanks,” White remembers. For six long weeks, White had been stuck in his house alone. Sure, he had his wife and kids. And he did throw huge pool parties, with hired bartenders. And, yes, during those six weeks he launched Howler Head. But in a way, for White, alone.
Unable to take it any more, he called a meeting of his entire Vegas staff at the UFC offices, a half-hour from the eerily silent Las Vegas Strip. In person.
At the gathering of nearly 300 people, White cited one of his company’s eight tenets: “Be first”. (There’s one for each side of the octagon.) “He said, ‘We’re going to be the leader making sure sports paves the way for America leading us out of this,’” recalls Crowley Sullivan, who runs Fight Pass, the UFC’s streaming service. “The room cheered. I’ve never been in a professional setting where that happened.”
Honour culture cleaves people into two tribes: your family and your enemies. Loyalty to family comes first. White might be blunt, but the workers who rate UFC anonymously on the employment website Glassdoor have almost nothing bad to say. He was not going to cut salaries or lay any of his work family off. He was going to find a way to put on fights. “I’m not going to grab all my shit and go hide in my big house and say, ‘Hope you can take care of your kids!’ How could I ever walk around this building again?” His voice cracks with emotion. “The one fucking time the shit hits the fan, I’m going to lay 30 per cent of you off and cut your salaries in half?”
Instead, he cut a deal to produce fights on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, an oasis for tourists that has a theme park, golf course and racing track. He renamed it Fight Island.
Many people thought holding an event during a pandemic was a very bad idea. The plan was thoroughly panned by mainstream media as reckless. White stared at the blue expanse of his pool: if every other company president and all those politicians and scientists and doctors and journalists were telling him he was wrong, and not just wrong, but a greedy Pied Piper leading his employees to hospital ventilators, and he had dropped out of two colleges after one semester each, what did he really know? Might he be wrong? Might he be a monster?
The moment lasted “like a second. And then I was like, ‘Yeah, no, we’re going,’” White says. At the UFC, it’s Fuck It Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The fear that gripped the US, he says, made him worry more than the virus. “I felt America getting soft for the last 15 years. This is a very scary fucking place right now with how soft we are,” he says. White never wore a mask, and he made sure that no one, including me, wore one around him. “You know why I got vaccinated? That lunatic” — he’s referring to Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel — “called me 357 times a day telling me to get vaccinated. I wasn’t into it, but I did it. I was one of the first.” Emanuel, a supporter of liberal causes, gets along well with White, who, despite his love of Trump, is a pacifist atheist whose voting record mostly hinges on who was most antiwar at the time: Bush, Kerry, Obama, Romney and then Trump twice.
White is sitting in the green room after the Volkanovski-Ortega weigh-in, folded into a chair even bigger than he is. He leaves a voicemail for Halle Berry, who starred in and directed the Netflix movie Bruised, about a mixed martial artist. She was supposed to have dinner with the winner of a charity raffle but can’t make it. So White decides to take them himself.
As he’s setting up reservations, two women enter. White excitedly shakes hands with Nour al-Harmoodi and Noura Kahil, who both work for Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism. White immediately apologises for touching them. Kahil, who is wearing a hijab, waves off the protest. “We’re not in Abu Dhabi,” she says, laughing. They’ve met White many times and find everything he says hilarious, only partly because everything is either a compliment about them or their country. After they leave, White has his assistant make them a reservation at Carbone, the Vegas outpost of the retro New York Italian joint where Sinatra blares from speakers and the rigatoni alla vodka costs $32, going through the menu to order his favourite dishes and pay for a meal there’s no way two human beings can eat.
The deal to create Fight Island wasn’t the first time the UFC partnered with questionable money. In 2018, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund invested in the creation of a UFC offshoot in the country, and White continues to book fighters affiliated with Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov’s Akhmat MMA fight club despite the gym and its affiliates being sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury.
But White’s love for Abu Dhabi is longstanding. And weird. It stems from the fact that crown prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan is really into Brazilian ju-jitsu. Many children study it in school as part of the curriculum. The country holds a number of the sport’s biggest tournaments and owned 10 per cent of the UFC before the Endeavor buyout.
The sheikh once took White hunting, though White bailed after shooting a bird. “It’s a horrifying experience. I killed a duck. That’s not right. It was flying around and having a good time and now it’s not — due to me? Fuck that,” he says. “Hunters are pussies. What’s a deer going to do to you?”
His attitude toward hunting did not hurt their relationship. Neither did the UFC’s insistence that fights held in the country include scantily clad ring card girls and openly lesbian fighters. White applied to be one of the 400 or so people, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Novak Djokovic, granted “golden visas” to the United Arab Emirates, and the relationship between the UFC and the UAE is stronger now than before the pandemic. Fight Island isn’t going away.
The Volkanovski-Ortega fight is my first since I was a sports writer in 1996 and saw Andrew Golota disqualified for hitting Riddick Bowe below the belt at Madison Square Garden. The incident led to a riot in the arena that sent 12 fans to the hospitals and resulted in 11 arrests. I swore I’d never go to a fight again.
People still get dressed up for fights. Sure, half of the 19,000 fans at the T-Mobile Arena are in T-shirts and jeans, but a lot are here on a Saturday night date, dressed like they’re auditioning to join the Rat Pack. Even White, whose business uniform is a T-shirt and jeans, suits up. He doesn’t sit in the front row with the odd assortment of outlaw celebrities: Mel Gibson and the Nelk Boys, Canadian YouTube pranksters that so amused White he took them aboard Air Force One to meet Trump. Instead, he, Campbell and Epstein sit at a table with the judges.
The fights start at 3pm, and a surprising number of people show up for all of them. I’m in the press seats ringside and, to my relief, despite the kicking, the submission holds, the fingerless gloves that result in more cuts and blood, the fights are no more violent than a boxing match. If anything, they’re more tactical because the fighters have so many more options. Still, whenever anything happens other than face punching, the crowd boos. Spectators are most satisfied with the ground-and-pound, when a fighter sits on top of their prone opponent and swings at their face with fists and elbows. The crowd is so enthusiastic that when combatant Jalin Turner triumphantly tosses his mouthguard into the stands, the lucky fan who scoops up the wet trophy high-fives his friend as if Covid didn’t exist.
The penultimate match is between flyweight challenger Lauren Murphy, a single-mom high-school dropout from Alaska who struggled with drug abuse, and Valentina Shevchenko, who’s from Kyrgyzstan but lives in Peru, speaks five languages, offers respect for opponents like a Zen master, won the Peruvian version of Dancing with the Stars and acts in Berry’s film. White says fans won’t accept a card without women fighting, and this is the second one of the night. His problem, he says, is he can’t find the female talent to meet demand.
The story of the final fight of the night, between Volkanovski and Ortega, is about how much they hated each other on The Ultimate Fighter. And it shows. Ortega gets punched so often his face becomes a Halloween mask of blood. He’s so woozy and weak that, in between rounds, the ref asks Ortega how many fingers he’s holding up, though the fans scream out the answer to make sure. the fight keeps going. This is why I stayed away from combat sports for 25 years.
In the third round, though, Ortega can see enough through his bloated face to jab Volkanovski in the head, sending him to the ground long enough for Ortega to put him in a choke hold. As the blood flow from Volkanovski’s carotid artery is cut off and his brain is deprived of oxygen — just as mine had been when White made me experience this years ago — the crowd cheers. As Volkanovski starts to lose consciousness, he somehow wiggles out and gets on top of Ortega. He grounds and pounds, improbably finding more places on Ortega’s face that aren’t yet bleeding to bust open.
Even though I’m on the other side of the ring from White, I must still be under his influence. Because while intellectually disgusted, I find the fight compelling.
Ortega, who can barely see as he lies there below Volkanovski, kicks up his legs, wraps them around Volkanovski’s neck and clamps down. It looks like it’s all over for Volkanovski, and the crowd can’t believe it. But again, Volkanovski slips out. When Ortega gets Volkanovski in another match-ending choke hold in the following round, Volkanovski gives the referee a cocky thumbs-up and gets away again. After five rounds of five minutes each, the judges give Volkanovski the unanimous victory. Most league commissioners would be professionally neutral. White celebrates wildly.
I can’t place two of the guys White’s sitting with. I’ve talked to everyone high-up at the UFC, yet they don’t look familiar. It turns out they’re the charity auction winners who were supposed to have dinner with Halle Berry. “I expected Dana White to say ‘I’ll have one drink and dinner is on me’, and leave,” says Dan Zampella, a New Jersey insurance underwriter who’d spent $30 on raffle tickets. “As soon as he saw me, he said, ‘I’m going to be out with you guys all night tonight.’”
White loves to gamble. But not in the way that most people do. “I’m not going there to hang out and have some drinks. I’m going in with a plan to cripple that place,” he says. White usually plays blackjack in a private room set up in the Mandalay Bay, where he blasts his own music and orders food from the restaurants at the hotel. Mandalay gave him a $75,000 limit to lure him from Caesars Palace, which only let him bet $50,000 a hand. He’s pretty sure that $75,000 — which he doubles by playing two hands at a time — is the highest limit anyone has in Vegas. “I’d bet a million a hand if they let me. All these casinos now are run by bean counters,” he says. “Vegas is nothing like it used to be.”
White doesn’t count cards. “I can barely count to 21 on my fingers and toes,” he says. But because a huge loss can hurt a casino’s bottom line, White has been banned from several after winning big. Not long ago, at the Mandalay Bay, he got a hand he was able to split five times and double-down on all of them, allowing him to win $750,000 on a single hand. “I’ve never done heroin. I’ve never snorted cocaine. But that’s what it feels like when the cards started flipping,” he says. “I give most of it away. I tip the shit out of everybody. It’s not like I’m buying mutual funds with it.” And he doesn’t share the stories with his family. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them. My wife won’t be reading this.”
White brought Zampella and his friend, along with a small entourage, to dinner at Prime Steakhouse at the Bellagio. When Zampella mentioned he’d lost $100 gambling there earlier, White dragged him back to the tables. But the Bellagio informed White it wouldn’t deal cards to people without a mask, so White got his driver to take them all downtown to the D Casino & Hotel. “He coached me through it and I won $1,000,” Zampella says, though he doesn’t know how much White won. “I was a nervous wreck because it was a lot.”
At 2.30am, Zampella’s friend, jet-lagged, insisted they leave White at the tables and return to their hotel. White’s enthusiasm had momentarily failed him. As White is telling me about his gambling wins, I let it slip that I don’t like blackjack. Upon hearing this, he makes me promise that next time I’m in Vegas, I’ll go with him to the Mandalay Bay to play with him all night. And somehow, even though none of that seems interesting to me, I can’t wait to do it.
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