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| ==UFC in the Public== | ==UFC in the Public== | ||
| The UFC now had there own reality T.V. show called the The Ultimate Fighter Challenge (TUF). Dana brings in two weight classes full of guys who want to become fighters. There have been two seasons so far. | The UFC now had there own reality T.V. show called the The Ultimate Fighter Challenge (TUF). Dana brings in two weight classes each season full of guys who want to become world class fighters. There have been two seasons so far and MMA has become more mainstream then ever. TUF and TUF 2 were aired on Spike TV and seaon 3 in comeing soon. | ||
Revision as of 21:25, 17 November 2005
Dana White is the current President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization. It is a Mixed martial arts event based in the United States. Mixed martial arts is a sport and fighting competition where the competitors learn one or more disciplines (such as judo, muay thai, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, sambo 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. A lot of the fighters that were formerly in the UFC such as Phil Baroni moved to Pride Fighting Championships due to the fact that Dana isn't one to be gracious to his fighters.
UFC
When Ultimate Fighting Championship came on the scene in 1993, it was originally about seeing which martial art was the best of all fighting arts. In short, the answer then was Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And the best exponent competing at the time was Royce Gracie, 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 boxing, wrestling and Jiu Jitsu. 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
UFC in the Public
The UFC now had there own reality T.V. show called the The Ultimate Fighter Challenge (TUF). Dana brings in two weight classes each season full of guys who want to become world class fighters. There have been two seasons so far and MMA has become more mainstream then ever. TUF and TUF 2 were aired on Spike TV and seaon 3 in comeing soon.
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 pro wrestling, 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 10th August 2003 with Chuck Liddell, who was representing UFC in a UFC versus PRIDE fight. And he knocked out Alistair Overeem 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