Dana White Q&A
UFC's president sounds off: The man who runs UFC has no room for competitors in his world.
The cover story of this morning's USA TODAY sports section looks at organizations trying to carve out pieces of the mixed martial arts market for themselves, notably EliteXC. But no one disputes that UFC remains the industry's dominant brand, a fact that UFC President Dana White is more than happy to emphasize.
USA TODAY's Beau Dure and I talked to White earlier this month about the MMA world and UFC's role in it. This blog ran a small bit of it last week ahead of UFC 84. Here are further excerpts from the interview:
Beau Dure: You had a couple of deals in the past year, 18 months with Pride, World Extreme Cagefighting that gave your organization an even greater market share than you already have. Do you think you've been able to leverage those deals as much as you'd like?
Dana White: I don't think it gave us a better market share, but basically what it does is — there was one called the World Fighting Alliance, too, that we purchased; the only reason I purchased the World Fighting Alliance was because I wanted Quinton Jackson's contract.
Then, the Pride thing. Realistically, the only company that I considered as big as the UFC, and it was over in Japan, not in the United States, was Pride. What I wanted to come away from Pride acquisition obviously was talent and that library. I wanted that library.
Sergio Non: At the time, you guys said you wanted to keep running Pride as a separate organization. Why didn't that work out? What happened there?
That didn't work out too well. It's a long, complicated story, but we're in a lawsuit right now with them. They didn't disclose a lot of things that they were supposed to. Basically, I can't talk about it because it's a big lawsuit right now, but yeah, that didn't work out the way I planned.
The other thing is, the WEC has worked out perfectly for us. We purchased the WEC and basically what we did with it is, the UFC goes from 155 to heavyweight and the WEC we made a lot of the lighter weights.
There are so many big stars in the lighter weights. The fights are so exciting. The WEC has actually turned out to be 10 times the product Pride ever was.
SN: You said you wanted to take the WEC's higher weight classes and move those guys over to the UFC. How is that coming along?
It's going to take some time, but yeah, that's exactly what we want to do. We want to move the higher weights over to the UFC and just keep the lower weights open in the WEC.
SN: What will be the dividing line? Will there be any overlap at 155 or 170?
There might be. Or not. We haven't really fully pulled the trigger on that one yet.
We might just go from under 155 down and add a couple more lighter weights.
BD: What do you think of the new Japanese promotions such as Dream and World Victory Road? Are they things that you welcome even though they may compete with you for fighters and pay-per-view money?
They don't compete with us for pay-per-view money. We're just competing for talent, no doubt about it. It's all good.
Listen, I can't have every fighter in the world under contract and I only want the best. I don't want the lower level guys.
All these guys who jump into this game, I need them. The IFL has spent a lot of money. These guys have spent upwards of high-20s to $30 million in the last year of half, we have these other guys coming in spending millions of dollars, Cuban's talking about spending millions of dollars. I love it. We need all these guys. Bring all your money and jump into this thing and spend it.
Because I need guys to get a bunch of experience. Got to keep guys getting paid. And whether they like it or not, they're the farm league.
BD: Other promoters have talked about the need to have unified champions, to let UFC champions fight champions of other organizations...
No other organization has anybody worthy of fighting the UFC champion. If you look at CBS, they have Kimbo Slice fighting, this guy was fighting in your backyard last weekend, you know what I mean?
BJ Penn at 155 pounds would destroy Kimbo Slice. Kimbo Slice isn't anywhere near that type of a level. He's not a professional athlete. He's not there. This guy was fighting in people's backyards.
Unfortunately that's the stigma we tried to stay away from. CBS is going right after that thing. Kind of weird.
SN: What about somebody like Affliction? They have Fedor; he's already beaten your champ twice.
Fedor beat my champ back in 2005. Fedor hasn't fought anybody since 2005. This whole urban legend thing has happened with Fedor with some of the hardcore fans.
Listen, you know who I give respect to? I give respect to the guys who are still fighting today. Fedor hasn't fought anybody — do your homework on that one — he hasn't fought anybody real or beaten anybody real since 2005. It's 2008 now.
And Affliction? This guy sells T-shirts for a living. This is what happens, too: for the last nine years that I've been in this business, every weekend there's a new guy that's got a bunch of money, and this guy's coming in, and he's going to compete with the UFC.
SN: You've said you won't do a TV network deal unless it makes sense for you. What do you need for it to make sense?
You've got all these guys out there right now that will cut any kind of deal that they can because they have nothing else.
This is how ******* stupid this is. Think about this, okay? For these guys to come out of the gate, this Affliction guy — this guy sells T-shirts for a living, okay? Ok, seriously, think about that, guys.
It's like us sitting on my couch on a Saturday afternoon watching NASCAR, okay? We're watching NASCAR and I'm like, "Holy ****, look at all the people that are at that race. They must be making a lot of money. They've got a network deal with Fox, too. You know what we should do? We should get a couple of their drivers and go out and start our own race league, and we'll compete head to head with NASCAR."
How dumb does that sound? Does that sound pretty stupid?
BD: No, I don't think that would work.
No, I don't think so either. And I think that's as dumb as this T-shirt guy thinking that he's going to come out and put on a show that big.
There's a way to do it. Listen, if we wanted to get into the race business, like NASCAR, what you do is you start out with a small, little race league and you try to build it up. You slowly start to build your business, but there's all these knuckleheads out there who want to raise all this capital and lose all this money.
Dana White AFP/Getty Images
The UFC, we came in and we were putting on small shows. The first show that we ever did was at the Trump Taj Mahal. We sold probably 3,000 tickets and probably had 4,500, 4,600 people there. I think our live gate did like $109,000; it was what our gate was. We started small and we built the business and now we run a business.
The thing is, you've got to understand, guys, I do 10 of these interviews a week and I start beating my ******* head off my desk when people ask me these crazy questions like "Do you think the Affliction guy is going to come in and take...?"
Are you kidding me? It's like me saying I'm going to go out tomorrow and start a T-shirt company and compete with Affliction. The **** do I know about selling T-shirts?
SN: Actually, you sell quite a few of them, don't you?
Yeah, well, that's different. Selling my T-shirts at my big event is one thing. Me going out and trying to talk to Nordstrom and Dillard's and trying to come up with a name to compete with Affliction — seriously, it's really crazy that people even ask me that.
SN: Right. But in terms of a TV network deal, what would you be looking for?
Oh yeah, you got me going off on a tirade there. I forgot what you even asked me.
Seriously, we're the real deal. We're the NASCAR of fighting. We're the NFL. We're Major League Baseball. I'm not going to cut a television deal that doesn't make sense for me. It has to make business sense. It has to make sense for our business model.
Mixed martial arts, everybody knows how big it is. We're the biggest pay-per-view provider in the united states, we beat the WWE and boxing two years in a row, this thing keeps getting bigger, it's not getting smaller, but we haven't even scratched the surface of how big this thing's going to be. We're so far from mainstream, still.
Things take time. I don't need a network television deal right now. I'm not going to run out there and cut a stupid one just to get on TV.
Believe me, there was a time when I was really hurting bad. My partners had invested $44 million into this thing and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. There was a time when I was feeling the crunch, and even through those hard times and all the **** that was going wrong, I never went out and cut a ****** television deal.
You don't think I could've went and bought my way? We were burning millions of dollars. Do you really think I couldn't have gone out there and paid my way onto television? I could've.
BD: Sure. I know plenty of sports leagues that do.
Didn't make sense to me. My philosophy on that was, when you ******* pay to get on television, when do you then go to them and go, "Wait a minute, I think you should be paying me."
At the end of the day, what we're really in is, we're in the pay-per-view business. My job and my crew's job here at the UFC is, we sit around and we create new ways to build our pay-per-view business, you know? To expose people to mixed martial arts, to expose them to the athletes, to learn.
It's basically an education process.
People are always asking me, can you bring your kids to a UFC event? Yeah, if you would let your kids watch professional boxing, you should absolutely bring your kids to a UFC event. Basically the people at the UFC event are the who's who from Las Vegas, the who's who from L.A. and a ton of hardcore fans who are very respectful people — most of these people are martial artists themselves.
(A few weeks ago), I go to the Yankees-Red Sox game ... People in the stands are yelling, "Hey Jeter, your mother's a ****** ****, you ****** ****, you queer." Any girl that walked by with a Yankees thing on, they were calling her a Yankee *****, Yankee ****. There had to be 70 fights in the stands that night, you know? And there's big, fat drunk guys spilling beer all over the place.
And there's little kids everywhere.
But we don't think about that because it's frigging baseball. We grew up with baseball, and you don't even think twice about bringing your kids around that.
Listen, we've got some knuckleheads fighting in the UFC and we have our moments, but overall, this is such a respectable sport. There's a lot more work to do, a lot more education, but I can guarantee you this: We've done everything we said we would do. Everything.
BD: In terms of getting new people involved, The Ultimate Fighter series was very successful for you on those lines, but the ratings have been a little bit down off of that now. Do you think it has accomplished all that it can, in terms of exposing the sport, now that your pay-per-view numbers are going up and maybe more people want to see the actual fights rather than the reality series?
I don't think so. This thing's in its seventh season. I start shooting season eight next week. Think of all the greatest television shows in the history of television, how many of them have gone eight seasons?
BD: That's sort of why I ask.
You look at what the numbers did the first season, we were pulling 1.7s — we pulled like a 2 when the whole Chris Leben-Josh Koscheck thing blew up — and that was the only mixed martial arts ever on television. At the same time, we were doing 5 pay per views a year.
Now we're going into our eighth season. Now you've got so much UFC programming on television it's unbelievable. You flip around and it's everywhere. You a had the IFL on MyNetwork TV. Stuff on Fox, Pride's still on Fox. We're doing 12 pay-per-views a year. There's just MMA everywhere.
Now you look at the number, we're still pulling 1.2s and 1.3s on the reality show. (Note: MMAPayout reports that the May 21 episode garnered a 1.0 rating)
The numbers are killer. Those are great numbers when you consider all the different options, all the different things that you can watch on television and now all the mixed martial arts you can watch on television. It's a great number.
SN: Speaking of Ultimate Fighter Season Eight, Nogueira and Mir are going to be your coaches on it. Who's on the horizon in your heavyweight division besides those two?
Brandon Vera. We've got this new kid who just fought on our last show, his name is Cain (Velasquez), we've got really high hopes for him. We've got some interesting guys coming up in the heavyweight division right now that we're excited about.
SN: You've said in the past that it's difficult to find good heavyweight talent out there ...
It's true. It's always hard to find good heavyweights and it's been that way in boxing for years too.
But this sport's getting so big and this sport is so global. Mixed martial arts gyms are popping up not only all over this country but all over the world. These kids that are growing up today are learning mixed martial arts. These kids are mixed martial artists. The level of athlete is going to continue to get higher and I think the fighters are going to become more and more exciting.
And now that there's some serious money in this thing, guys who would have played football or basketball or baseball, now some of them will become mixed martial artists.
SN: At what point do you say, "We can't run any more shows than we're running because we've saturated the market."
I don't even think we're close to saturating the market. It's a big world out there. It is a big world out there and as distribution continues to change — when we first bought this company, I had In-Demand, DirecTV and Dish Network (as) my only outlets. As the Internet starts to open up now, there's the world. And this is a truly global sport. And we are seriously, seriously aggressive guys.
SN: You said earlier that, obviously, you can't have every fighter in the UFC. What fighters outside the UFC currently intrigue you?
There are, honestly, no guys outside of the UFC that I'm interested in right now. When I say that, I mean in other organizations.
SN: Why is that? They have to come from somewhere.
They have to come from somewhere, but nobody has anybody interesting right now.
BD: So your hope is, eventually they'll develop in other organizations and become UFC-ready?
The bottom line is, I have all the best fighters in the world right now.
Ok, obviously I wouldn't mind bringing Fedor in, and I've tried to do a deal with him a couple of times now. But ... if there was anybody else out there that I wanted, I'd get them.
SN: You've said before that you wouldn't mind seeing knees to the head. Any chance of that being included in the unified rules at some point?
First of all, we're still opening states to get them to take it (MMA, in general). To start changing rules now — it's going to be a long time.
Think about this: When was the last time a new sport was created? A real big sport like the NFL or something like that. Been a long time. We're in the infancy of this thing. There's so much work to do.
And one of the things is, I'm the one out here doing all the work. Everybody else is riding in our wake.
SN: Back when you first bought UFC, at the time Pride were the big guys and you said you wanted to share fighters. And you did, you sent Chuck Liddell and Ricco Rodriguez over there. At this point, what would it take for you to agree if someone says, "We want to borrow some UFC fighters..."
Why would I do that? The whole sharing-the-fighters thing never really worked out very well. I tried that when there was another big organization out there.
There's no other fighters out there or promotions out there that are worthy of doing that. No, I would never do it.
BD: So even hypothetically, let's say if an organization such as World Victory Road became as big as Pride was in Japan, and they wound up with a couple of fighters — say five years down the road — who a lot of the mixed martial arts media seemed to think were as good as the current UFC champions. Would you work toward a unification fight or would you say, "No, you guys sign with UFC first."
I don't know. For me to say what I would do five years from now — I never say never. I don't know.
