Dana White, King of MMA

spoke, Dana asked me to go to all these stores and add a couple more stores to my
route. I told him that, if I kept walking into these stores every day and not buying
anything, someone was going to get suspicious and think I was trying to steal
something. Moreover, it was taking me all day to run around Boston to all these
stores. Dana asked me to please do it one more day and that would be the end of it,
and I did. Talk about micromanaging a business. However, today UFC DVDs are the
biggest sellers in stores like Wal-Mart, and their video games sell out as soon as they
go on the market.
The first fight after Dana purchased the UFC was on February 23, 2001 in Atlantic
City, UFC 30 at the Trump Taj Mahal, a 4,500 seat venue. These days, the UFC easily
sells out 44,000 seat arenas. I attended every fight for the first three years after Dana
purchased the UFC, and in the very beginning, I was often the only family member at
the fight. Dana always called a couple days before the fight and asked if I was going
to be there. I remember thinking that I was going to the fights to support him and I
would just chat with people in attendance because I really wasn’t interested in the
fights and knew very little about MMA. I was quite amazed when, I found myself
jumping to my feet and screaming, “Finish him as one fighter put the other in a
chokehold or had just landed a punishing blow to the head and you knew it was all
over. I had no idea where that came from, some primal piece of DNA leftover from
our ancestral caveman family perhaps.
Maybe a more fitting comparison would be the Romans at the Coliseum. I still find
the music and the gladiator at the beginning of UFC pay-per-views so fitting.
Eventually, I knew who most of the fighters were and had my favorites, like Chuck
Liddell, Randy Couture, Jens Pulver, and Yves Edwards, I would want to see win. I
also liked it when Tito Ortiz entered the arena with the American flag, very patriotic.
I learned many of the moves and countermoves of the fighters, and knowing these
things makes the fights a lot more interesting.
I remember going to UFC 37, High Impact, in Bossier City, Louisiana; and as I was
flying over Louisiana and the plane was coming down for the landing, all I could see
for miles and miles were trees. I could not even see houses in between the trees. I
remember looking out a window, standing in a hallway at the arena, and thinking,