Dana White, King of MMA

good at math now. You cannot deal with the sums of money he does and not be good
with numbers.
When Dana was in fifth grade, we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. I applied to
nursing school while we lived in Ware, Massachusetts and was accepted. I attended
school fulltime and worked fulltime. After two years of school, I received my degree
in science and was able to take the exams to become a registered nurse. Dana Sr. had
been in and out of our lives since I had left him in Florida. I knew he was never going
to change and be the husband or father we needed, and so I made it final and filed
for divorce. Dana’s father would not let me get on with my life, however, and so after
graduating with my nursing degree I decided it would be best to start over somewhere
else. In April of 1980, off to Las Vegas we went. Las Vegas was a small town back
then. They had just put traffic lights in and UNLV was in the middle of the desert. At
a bar a few blocks from our house, men still rode their horses to the bar and tied
them to a post out front. The Strip was made up of some small hotels — the Sands,
the Dunes, the Sahara, and a few others — and there were vast areas of desert
between them.
Dana finished fifth grade at Gene Ward Elementary in Las Vegas, but sixth grade
was a problem. When I received his report card, I found out he had been absent from
school for twenty-plus days. I was furious with both Dana and the school. Dana would
leave everyday as if he were going to school but never get on the bus. The school
never called me to let me know he was not showing up for school day after day.
When I called about his absences, unbelievably their response was, “It’s not our job
to keep track of your son.” I was even more furious with Dana than with the school
administrators for thinking he was going to get away with it. I had very few rules in
my house, but the big one was, “Do Not Lie to Me!” Acting as if he was going to school
every day and then not attending was indeed a lie, and I told him I was going to put
him in Catholic school to solve this problem. The nuns would take care of him and
there would be no more missing school once he was with them. Although this was
mostly an idle threat because most of Catholic schools no longer had nuns teaching
the classes, but he didn’t know that.