| Revision as of 07:52, 15 November 2005 edit208.22.104.18 (talk) →The Future of UFC← Previous edit | Revision as of 14:36, 15 November 2005 edit undo216.26.205.9 (talk)No edit summaryNext edit → | ||
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| HE IS A FREAKING PLUG! | |||
| ]'''Dana White''' is the current President of the ] organization. It is a ] event based in the ]. Mixed martial arts is a sport and fighting competition where the competitors learn one or more disciplines (such as ], ], ], ], ], ] etc.) in an effort to defeat the other fighter. | |||
| == Life == | |||
| Born in Manchester, Connecticut, Dana grew up in Las Vegas and has a background in boxercise, ballet dancing, and grappling. | |||
| "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, and I discovered he was selling UFC." | |||
| "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.’ A month later we owned it." | |||
| Dana has a reputation for not paying his fighters well. This is why Tito Ortiz no longer fights in the UFC. | |||
| == UFC == | |||
| When ] came on the scene in ], it was originally about seeing which martial art was the best of all fighting arts. In short, the answer then was ]. And the best exponent competing at the time was ], having been champion for three of the first four UFCs. Today the best art is not any one particular discipline, but a combination of the best of two or three arts: particularly ], ] and ]. And the UFC has helped to refine martial arts worldwide. | |||
| "It’s a little tough for the traditional martial artists to swallow, because one system doesn’t do it. You’ve got to cross-train in many different systems. 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." -Dana White | |||
| == The Future of UFC == | |||
| The UFC has been forced to instill many rules that have made it unathentic in it's claims. Dana White believes the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s tag ‘As Real As It Gets’ to be an accurate description. He agrees it’s as close to a one-on-one street situation as you can get within the law, "No doubt about it. The reality is, there’s nothing fake, obviously, like ], and it is the most hard-core, full-contact event in the world." | |||
| Dana White can see a day when the UFC will be bigger than pro wrestling and world boxing events. He believes because the youth of today are growing up with mixed martial arts, rather than boxing alone, they will not be satisfied with watching a fighter employing just his fists, when he has so many other weapons and skills at his disposal. | |||
| "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 ] ] with ], who was representing UFC in a UFC versus PRIDE fight. And he knocked out ] 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," - Dana White | |||
| ==See also== | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| ==External links== | |||
| * | |||
| ] | |||
Revision as of 14:36, 15 November 2005
HE IS A FREAKING PLUG!