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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 is one to graciously thank for the coming of the UFC, he is one the first to believe that this sport would make it big and thanks to him, it did.
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 comeng 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.