There’s only one kind of business Dana White will gladly admit to failing at: funny business.
No, not the kind of funny business with which boxing is often associated: corruption, cash-grabs, and the self-interests of the select few – things, incidentally, that White says he is seeking to challenge with his Zuffa Boxing promotion, fuelled by the riches of an affiliation with Turki Alalshikh and informed by the incredible success of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the world-conquering brand that White has helmed since 2001.
It is a different type of funny business that White struggles with, and which he would rather never try again, having been left “messed up for four days” after attempting it.
“Stand-up comedy is the worst. It tortures you,” says White, of the only thing he claims has taken him out of his comfort zone.
“I would have to say, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.
“Like, I’ve been to comedy clubs. There’s 10, 15 people in there, whatever. When we did it in LA, the comedy club that we went to [the Laugh Factory] promoted it [heavily]. So, we pull up to the place – there’s a line a mile down the street. You couldn’t fit one more person in the place.
“And this is the first time I’ve ever done it. But I cheated. Tony Hinchcliffe wrote my jokes for me. Nobody knew him then [in 2016]; now he’s huge. And even though a professional comedian wrote my jokes, I just…
“So, you’re sitting there, right? And it’s your time to do the jokes. The guy runs right up with the camera in your face: ‘Make everybody laugh, make everybody laugh.’ It’s just… I cannot. This is another level.
“I shit you not, my body was messed up for four days after that. I was physically destroyed. I don’t think there’s anything harder or more of a mindf*** than stand-up comedy.”
One gets the feeling that it must be true, if Dana White is saying it. This is, after all, one of the world’s most successful businessmen; a man who runs multibillion-dollar companies, with all the pressures and competition and expectation and public glare that comes with it, and does so with visible confidence and an uncompromising attitude towards his critics and rivals.
It’s not just Turki Alalshikh to whom he has close business ties. The UFC – and now Zuffa Boxing – are part of TKO Group, the sports and entertainment giant led by Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro and Nick Khan, which also has WWE under its umbrella, meaning TKO is comprised of the biggest brands in MMA and wrestling as well as the most headline-grabbing recent arrival on the boxing scene.
And beyond fight sports, White sits on the board of Meta, the social media behemoth behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and he is not just a business associate but a close friend of US President Donald Trump. White was literally President Trump’s right-hand man on the night of June 14, when the pair walked from the White House to cageside for the UFC’s Freedom 250 event staged on the lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
A man who has got this far can only do so if he thrives on the big stage, is comfortable among powerful people, and can handle pressure – stand-up comedy notwithstanding.
“I guess my biggest skillset is that I like stress. I actually enjoy stress,” he says.
“And if I’m not stressed, I try to figure out other ways to make myself feel more pressure. Like, pressure doesn’t bother me. I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. I love it.”
That attitude will serve him well as Zuffa makes inroads into boxing, a sport that doesn’t tend to welcome combative disruptors. While Zuffa’s shows have typically featured good action resulting from keen matchmaking, a major part of White’s strategy has been to ruffle feathers, be they those belonging to boxing’s sanctioning bodies or the sport’s old-guard promoters.
Of them, White has most routinely rucked with Eddie Hearn. He has poached some of Hearn’s biggest stars, including Conor Benn and Johnny Fisher, in moves seen as middle-finger gestures as much as commercial acquisitions, and has been gleefully involved in social media smack talk with the Matchroom chairman, to the point where there was speculation that the two promotional powerhouses may even engage in a boxing match of their own.
It was fanciful stuff, but the kind of material lapped up and distributed far and wide by social media, which is, in all likelihood, precisely why White ran with it: it’s a surefire way to generate publicity for himself and his brand.
But even assuming the biggest – and most literal – white-collar boxing match of all time never happens, White does already boast greater in-ring legitimacy than Hearn, given that he has actually boxed.
He compiled a self-reported 13-4 amateur record, starting at age 17 and fighting out of the McDonough Gym, when he still in high school in Boston, Massachusetts. White twice attempted to pursue college, but dropped out both times and harboured ambitions of becoming a pro boxer.
It may come as a surprise to some to learn that the man who essentially created MMA as we know it today was raised on boxing.
“My earliest boxing memories were when I was a kid, with my uncles,” he says. “We’d be over at my grandmother’s house and the big fights would be on. I just remember my uncles all going crazy. I remember the buzz and the excitement inside the house, and I guess I just became addicted to it.”
It was that buzz that led White into the ring himself, but those pro ambitions were tempered by witnessing an ageing and apparently damaged ex-boxer’s uncoordinated attempts to work a heavy bag.
“I remember looking at him thinking, ‘what if it happens to me?’,” White told the Associated Press in 2018.
Expanding on the end of his own fighting days to Boxing News, he says: “I loved it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But I was standing there going, ‘what the hell am I doing here, man? I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life’.
“And I walked out that day and I quit, and I said, ‘I’m getting into the fight business.’
“I didn’t know exactly what it meant at the time, but I knew that’s where I wanted to be. And I was young, I had no obligations, no family, none of that stuff. If I’m going to go for it, now’s the time to go for it.
“And I did. Obviously, at the time, everybody thought it was the dumbest idea ever. Maybe it was! But it all worked out.”
Which is an understatement. According to Forbes, the 57-year-old’s estimated net worth is $600 million, and the UFC, which he was named president of in 2001 after his friends and business partners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought it, is now valued at $12bn.
Even on its own, the UFC is enormous, to the degree that it is often conflated with an entire sport. There are, of course, many other MMA promotions, but to the casual observer, UFC is essentially a genericised trademark for mixed martial arts. And UFC being in the same fold as WWE and Zuffa Boxing makes TKO Group the biggest entity not just in a sport but in all of combat sports, and one which commercially competes with the American colossuses of franchise team sports. Consequently, despite being a relative newcomer to boxing promotion, White does not even view other boxing promoters as his rivals.
“In my world, like the Eddie Hearns and the Frank Warrens and all them – you realise, that is not my competition,” he says. “None of those guys are competition for me and my business.
“The NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball and the NHL – that’s my competition.
“I don’t even look at these other [boxing] guys, you know? Frigging Jake Paul? Are you f***ing kidding me? None of these people are my competition. Who I just mentioned, the four majors, they’re my competition.
“Here’s the reality: I just did a $7.7bn deal with Paramount. Now, if you play at the level we play at, I guarantee you in the NFL offices, they said, ‘What? There was $7.7bn over at Paramount? That should have been our money!’
“That’s the world I’m in now. Those are the guys that I’m competing with, not all these other [boxing] guys out there. Not even close.”
That Paramount deal is for UFC and Zuffa events to be streamed on that network across the United States and Canada (Sky Sports show Zuffa Boxing in the UK). That does mean Zuffa is the only boxing shown on Paramount, which may appear to put White at a disadvantage when most of his competitors (even if he won’t refer to them as such) are on DAZN – meaning boxing fans have to pay for yet another subscription if they are to view Zuffa content.
The difference, though, is that while DAZN does live up to its own claim to be “the home of boxing”, it is a broadcaster that only shows sport, and which places a greater emphasis on boxing above all else. As much as that appeals to existing fight fans, it is a model that is unlikely to create new ones. Paramount, as a broad-spectrum broadcaster, offers greater potential to tap the mainstream market.
And this plays into White’s longer-term strategy. Yes, broadcasting as a whole is more fragmented than ever, but White believes on-demand streaming, delivered to anywhere with an internet connection, in most countries, will make boxing accessible to the wider public again.
“When I grew up, there was Channel 3, Channel 5, Channel 8 and Channel 13,” he says of the terrestrial networks in the US. “And I believe that’s going to exist again, but globally, in the next 10 years.
“Lorenzo [Fertitta] and I, when we started this thing, we always used to dream of a day when everybody on the planet could watch the same fight at the same time on the same channel. Every year, we get closer and closer to that. And now we have the Paramount deal – listen, my deal is seven years – so that’s going to happen in the next seven years.”
An admirable dream, and one which does at least sound feasible.
White’s other big-ticket ambition may prove less realistic – even if it is, in theory, music to the ears of boxing fans: returning boxing to a state of one world champion per weight division.
Boxing hasn’t had this since 1963 and the formation of the WBC in addition to the WBA. The IBF and WBO came along in the 1980s, and we are now in what is tiresomely referred to as the “four-belt era”. White’s answer to this would appear counterintuitive: he has introduced yet another belt – his own Zuffa Boxing championship. In doing so, he initially stated that Zuffa would not recognise the four existing alphabet bodies, presumably imagining that his brand would become so desirable to boxers that they would eschew the traditional titles in favour of his.
This is essentially what happened with Zuffa’s first flagship signing, Jai Opetaia, the Australian cruiserweight who held the IBF title at the time.
Even though Opetaia had long made it known he wanted to pursue undisputed status, he was crowned the inaugural Zuffa champion in March, after defeating Brandon Glanton, which compelled the IBF to strip Opetaia of their belt.
It’s all well and good for Zuffa to say they won’t “recognise” the existing sanctioning bodies – but recognition goes both ways. The Association of Boxing Commissions does not recognise Zuffa as a championship, and nor does BoxRec, the industry’s go-to recordkeeping service. As it stands, the Zuffa belt is no more than a ceremonial prize. The IBF essentially regarded Opetaia’s last fight as a non-title contest, and one which he, as their champion, did not seek permission to engage in – hence him being stripped.
Since then, Zuffa’s Conor Benn challenged WBC welterweight champion Ryan Garcia, and Aaron McKenna won the IBF middleweight title on Zuffa’s Ireland debut, so it would appear White has had a rethink. He’s gone from telling journalist Dan Rafael “I am not interested in working with sanctioning bodies. I have no interest in it whatsoever” in March, to what he now tells Boxing News is a “fluid scenario”.
“With the Zuffa title, there won’t be any question as to who the best in the world is, because you will fight your way up through the gauntlet of bad-ass guys in the sport to become number one and then become the world champion,” he says, although critics might argue that Glanton, who was outclassed by Opetaia, did not quite fit the description of a “bad-ass guy”, at least in so far as being among the world’s elite.
“The matchmaking will be, you know… you’re not going to have thousands of guys in the sport that are undefeated. But as you’re stepping to the destination that you want to get to, certain fighters will want to compete for a WBC belt or an IBF belt. So, therefore, it has to be a fluid scenario before you get to the end destination. Some of these kids are like, ‘I always dreamed of fighting for this belt’, and if that is what their goal is, you know, we’ll try to help them do that.”
It is perhaps the first concession made by a man who came into boxing with the idea that he could tear up and rebuild one of the world’s oldest sports, and one with the entrenched interests of powerbrokers with decades or even generations of skin in the game.
Still, White insists this is a broken sport, but believes this presents him with an opportunity, just as it did when he took over the UFC.
“There’s a lot of things about the business of boxing that I don’t like,” he says.
“I mean, even back then, at amateur level, when I was dealing with amateurs, it was just broken, corrupt and bad. So, it worked out perfectly for me, personally, in that when we got into the UFC, I was able do everything the way that I wanted to do it. Everything that I wanted to do with boxing, I did with the UFC.
“People ask if the best description [for Zuffa] is that I’ll be building the UFC model in boxing. Well, it’s the boxing model [that I wanted] that ended up being the UFC model that will now be the boxing model, if that makes sense.
“When I first started [the UFC], the narrative was, ‘you will never be as big as boxing; it’s impossible. Well, now here we are, 25 years later, and yeah, it’s doing OK! [Laughs].
“And then they said I’m not going to go into boxing and do everything the way I wanted to do it. Well, I am.
“You know, everything in life is about timing. In the United States, boxing was so broken that when we did our first [boxing] events, UFC fans would come, all these young people that usually come to my [UFC] fights, they didn’t know anything about boxing. They didn’t even understand. And the older generation remembers the glory days.
“So, for me, to wrap my head around that, I’m just going to rip it apart and start from the bottom and build it from scratch. But there’s a lot of work to do, just like there was in the UFC.
“Every once in a while, a big fight will pop up that people will tune in and watch, and the promoters that put it on come in, and it’s a going-out-of-business sale, and they grab as much money as they can, and they don’t care whether the live experience was good, or the television experience was good, and then they run off for another year or two, and then they’ll pop back up, and it’s always these money-grabs every year or two.
“And listen, I don’t ever – well, I already did it, and I don’t want to do it again – I don’t want to be a part of anything that loses money. I think of the other guys involved in the sport are just trying to suck out as much money as they can, and that’s just not what I do.
“We will put on consistent fights, build guys up, and build the trust up with the boxing fans, like we do with the UFC. We have built this level of trust with our fans that they know we’re going to deliver. Anywhere in the world, we’re going to deliver.”
Except, perhaps, on the stand-up comedy stage.
