Dana White: I Howard Hughes’d myself after UFC sale

Dana White made it through high school, tried two semesters of college, gave it up, and became a highly-compensated bell hop in Boston. He had boxed enough to understand that that was not his destiny, but was an early pioneer in using boxing as means of conditioning regular people, women especially.

He was successful enough at that that a minion of utterly terrifying gangster Whitey Bulger came looking for money. More money than he had.

So White lit out for the desert, literally. He flew with no money to Vegas and got involved with fighter management, in both boxing and MMA; his roster included Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. He learned that the UFC was for sale, and in 2000 approached two friends from high school (White attended high school in multiple states, Nevada being one) about buying it.

The friends, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, were growing an innovative hotel/casino founded by their father into an empire. White got 10% of the new fighting concern, and an office in a closet. He drove a purple Gremlin. The Fertitta brothers got a magical pit that made money disappear. Tens of millions of dollars in fact.

They were looking for someone to take it off their hands, before deciding to try the magical pit a final time, funding a reality television show. The final fight of The Ultimate Fighter 1, Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar, was everything the sport is, and we were saved.

It was, finally, magical.

15 years later the UFC sold for over $4,000,000 to William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. White is staying on, and gets 10% of profit.

It is the Rocky story, except instead of brain damage, the hero is vastly rich. However, instead of shouting “Adrian” White had more ambiguous emotions.

White appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Show Thursday night to talk about it.

“It doesn’t suck,” said White, as transcribed by Chuck Mindenhall for MMA Fighting.

“You know, you get to the point where you…you know, I’m 47, and I’ve been working, we’ve been doing this for almost 20 years. And I don’t know what else I need.

“I can tell you this, and this is the honest to god truth. When this deal closed, it bugged me out a little bit. I don’t know. When you make that kind of money and my partners, I’ve been with them for more than 20 years. So that’s going to change, I have new partners now. And yeah, I kind of Howard Hughes’d myself up into a hotel room for a couple of days. I couldn’t eat or sleep, it kind of freaked me out a little bit.”

The new deal has him staying on until 2021, but he is in for the long haul.

“I’m 47 and I love this sport and I love what I do for a living,” said White. “And I would have signed a 55-year deal with these guys. So, I’m in.”

White was asked if he would be getting the money in a physically gigantic check like Ed McMahon gave for the Publisher’s Clearing House.

“What they do is, when you do a deal like this, it has to go through a bunch of regulation,” said an amused White. “But once the regulation is done and the thing finally closes, I guess you just get a check,” he said, smiling. “That’s how it works.”

Image courtesy of Joel Gold’s Full Contact Fighter.