Dana White, King of MMA

“Where are all the people going to come from for this fight? There are no homes.
There are no people around here.” They did come though — 7,200 was the attendance
— and although the UFC did not sell out the arena as they do now, overall; I thought
they did pretty well. I believe someone was fired for that one.
UFC 30, 31, and 32 were all in New Jersey. Tank About had come into the building
at one of the fights, and as he was walking down the steps to a seat near the ring, the
crowd began to chant “Tank, Tank, Tank” over and over and over, they were getting
louder and louder with every chant. The UFC had hired Carmen Electra to a six-month
contract to be the spokesperson for the UFC. When the crowd started chanting,
Lorenzo grabbed Carmen by the hand and brought her to where the cameras could
hone in on her and not Tank. They didn’t want the crowd caught up in Tank coming
in. Dana had told me that, when he and Lorenzo first met with Carmen, they were
both surprised by how beautiful she was in person. They thought that she probably
looked good on television because of makeup, but that in person she would not be
such a beauty. Hiring her actually helped the UFC with publicity that they would not
have gotten otherwise.
UFC 33, Victory in Vegas, was at Mandalay Bay and their first fight in Las Vegas. It
was on September 28, 2001. Think back two weeks and three days before that date, it
was 9/11, when the Twin Towers in New York City were attacked, and the country
was still very much in a state of shock. People were terrified that the Twin Towers
were only the beginning. People were not flying or traveling, and Dana was sure that
people were not going to travel to Las Vegas for his fight with the horror of 9/11 so
fresh in everyone’s minds. Dana was worried sick that his first Las Vegas show would
be a complete failure, and there were quite a few people telling him exactly that: the
event was going to fail miserably.
The attendance was 9,500 and the gate was $816,660.00, which was good. This
was also the first UFC event sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
The fight was somewhat of a disaster, because most of the fights that night went to a
decision, the broadcast ran over and cut out early on the cable stations, leaving all
the pay-per-view fans unhappy. They did not get to see the end of the Ortiz-