Dana White, King of MMA

Dana’s maternal grandfather, Bertram Wills, was born in Somerville,
Massachusetts on July 8, 1896; he died when I was sixteen, and his death changed all
our lives greatly. Bert was a big man of six foot, two inches and weighing in at around
two hundred and fifty pounds. He had a ruddy complexion and thin gray hair combed
off to one side. He wore a hat that men in the 1930s wore, and I always liked that,
but Bert was a man to be feared. He was both physically and verbally abusive to my
siblings, my mother Madelyn (O’Neil), and me. The abuse to Madelyn occurred mostly
when Bert was drinking, but for my siblings and me, anything could set him off at any
time. Growing up in our household, you always had to be on guard because you never
knew when he would erupt. Bert’s marriage to Dana’s grandmother was his second
marriage, and he was twenty-one years older than Madelyn. Bert had two grown
children from his first marriage and six children with Madelyn, all of us just fourteen
to sixteen months apart. His grandmother, who was from Ireland and who ran a
boarding house in Cambridge for the young men who went to Harvard, had raised
Bert. He was fiercely proud that he came from Irish ancestry and many a fight
erupted in many a bar when some poor soul would suggest that the surname Wills was
not Irish but English. He was a huge boxing fan, and he had been an amateur boxer in
the Navy, although I understand his record was not anything to brag about.
Dinner was always at five o’clock on the dot, and you better be seated at the
table by five or all hell would break loose. Dinner was always meat and potatoes,
except on Friday when all Catholics had fish. Dinner at the Wills household was
anything but pleasant, it was always very tense and stressful and nothing to look
forward to. Bert would go off in a rage with the slightest provocation, which kind of
sounds like someone else I know. Something as small as someone holding his or her
fork the wrong way would set him off, which in turn sent him into a rage through the
rest of the meal, usually causing him to hit one of my two brothers, Dennis or Dickie.
They had the misfortune of having the seats next to my dad at the dinner table (we
all had assigned seats that we had to sit in every night), Talking was not allowed at
the dinner table, and I just hoped we could just get through the meal without one of
us getting a beating. I remember thinking,, if I just kept my head down, eyes lowered