The Good, Bad and Ugly of Dana White

I watched 60 minutes of Dana on the In Search of Excellence Podcast by Randall Kaplan for this

So Dana White had a relatively big news day today on MMA social media.

Believe it or not this is kind of unusual. For two reasons, maybe three.

First up, Dana doesn’t talk to the MMA media much these days. He rarely does post- fight scrums. He certainly isn’t dropping by The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani or Morning Kombat with Luke Thomas and Brian Campbell.

No, as Zach Arnold has pointed out before, under Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor/TKO, Dana limits his media access to seemingly random podcasts (often hosted by people he has a business or personal connection with) and the most gullible mainstream media outlets where he’s guaranteed softball questions.

The second reason is most of MMA media has heard Dana’s spiel so many times it’s rarely worthy of discussion amongst the cognoscenti of cage fighting, humble folk that we are.

I forget the third reason and besides let’s get to the things that had people Tweeting about Dana.

First up there was some discussion of an MMA Fighting story by Damon Martin which was covering a TKO executive alright — one that actually makes major business decisions for the company — but not Dana.

No it was Endeavor/TKO vice-alpha dog Mark Shapiro talking about Dana White that was getting the reaction.

Damon knew what he was doing when he added a question mark to the tweet that wasn’t present in his headline. And BE alum Trent Reinsmith took the bait:

Ignoring the fact that David Stern deserves about as much credit for Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson as you or I do, Trent’s right.

For those new to the sport, Dana White has historically had very little interest in building stars. He’s excelled at marketing fighters who’ve already proven to be extremely skilled and charismatic, but he’s never really taken a fighter who wasn’t already a proven commodity and made them a star.

This goes all the way back to Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell, both of whom were already proven champions with outsized images and personalities when Dana became their manager, much less the boss of the UFC.

Many of his biggest stars were acquired from other promotions, especially Pride (Wanderlei Silva, Anderson Silva) and Strikeforce (Ronda Rousey, Nick Diaz). Brock Lesnar was already a star in the WWE AND he had a blue-chip amateur wrestling background.

Conor McGregor was already building career momentum in Ireland before Sean Shelby signed him to the UFC. Which was before Dana ever heard of Conor.

Initially The Ultimate Fighter reality show built some stars — Forrest Griffin, Rashad Evans, Michael Bisping etc — but by the fourth or fifth season that was mostly over.

Why? Simple, in the very first seasons of The Ultimate Fighter getting to be on a cable TV reality show and winning a UFC contract were very attractive to top tier fighters.

And why was that? Simple, the UFC had a tiny roster in 2005. They only put on 10 events the whole year and the year before they’d only done 5.

And in 2005 there were a lot of fighters making decent, but not great money in thriving regional MMA scenes around the country so the reality tv rip off was a novel scam that many fell for.

But by 2008 or so, word had gotten out that fighters who got into the UFC via TUF were locked into much worse contracts than fighters who were signed direct from other promotions.

Which is a classic example of the UFC being nothing more than a microcosm of larger American business trends. In this case the early 2000s discovery by the TV networks that if they didn’t pay scriptwriters and used non-actors (also non-union) they could pay them like game show contestants even if the ratings made the networks billions.

I digress.

Where was I?

Oh yea, TKO underboss Mark Shapiro quoted by Damon Martin discussing Dana White. Check this shit:

“By in large, the biggest reason for our success is Dana White himself,” Shapiro said. “I mean we have a great team behind him in management, Lawrence Epstein, who runs UFC day-to-day and Craig Borsari, who does the production and Pete Dropick, who oversees the live events. But Dana White is all that and then some.

“He’s a marketer, he’s a star all by himself. He’s an unbelievable leader. He’s an incredible matchmaker. His social is growing arguably faster than the UFC itself. But the best thing he is, he’s a star builder.”

I picked these two paragraphs because between running the UFC day-to-day, producing the shows and live events….Epstein, Borsari and Dropick deserve some of the credit that habitually goes to Dana.

I chose the second paragraph because it points out that Dana’s actual job is essentially to talk and increasingly these days to talk about himself rather than the UFC.

That’s a very important job and Dana excels at it.

But then I fell into the rabbit hole.

The last time one of Dana White’s random podcast appearances came across my social media transom it was that kayfabe appearance he did where he pretended to storm off the Howie Mandel Show (does Endeavor rep Howie? Just asking).

This time it was a short clip in Ben Fowlkes feed:

Since X.com and Substack don’t get along, here’s the YouTube embed, time stamped (5:12 if I messed up) that contains the snipped Ben was sharing on the former Twitter.

What Ben was reacting to that Dana said on the podcast that I already named in the subheading and don’t care enough to cut and paste again is after the paywall because I had to edit Dana’s curse words back into the redacted version that YouTube provides so I’ll see the paying subscribers after the jump: