Today, the UFC has a deal with Fox television and is reportedly worth somewhere north of $2 billion. In 2001, things were much different. So different, that the original owners of the promotion, Semaphore Entertainment Group, sold the UFC to Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta and their company, Zuffa, for $2 million.
Since that purchase, the UFC has visited the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas many times. The first Zuffa event to take place there was UFC 34, a fight card that featured a heavyweight title bout that saw Randy Couture retain his belt with a third-round TKO win over Pedro Rizzo.
On Saturday night, the UFC was back in the familiar confines of the MGM Grand for UFC 160. Like UFC 34, the promotion’s heavyweight champion successfully defended his title with a stoppage win, as Cain Velasquez earned a first-round TKO over Antonio Silva.
After the fight, UFC president Dana White, who has been a part of the Zuffa family since day one, waxed nostalgic about the old days inside the MGM Grand, saying: “Tonight, when we got here, the suites up in the lofts here, the skylofts? I’m up in the skylofts, and we’re walking down that hallway, and I literally said, ‘You know what this reminds me of? When we were first breaking through, and we were doing these things I used to throw huge parties in the skylofts, and when Chuck (Liddell) would win a fight he would come after, and it was crazy.’”
Those days are a thing of the past according to White, “Now when the fight’s over I go run and hide and eat and go home, I’m old. The parties are over. When Chuck would fight in Vegas when this thing started to take off it was awesome. It was so much fun because it was so new, and we were finally making it and we were on the way up.”
Age may have some influence on White’s post-fight antics these days, but so might the fact that the UFC is much bigger than it was in 2001, putting on more than 30 fight cards a year in locations that span the globe. The UFC president is at the majority of those events.
White is also involved with growing the promotion through their partnership with Fox. “Now, we have so much shit to do,” he said. “Between programming all these different countries, the Fox deal alone is a beast. Building networks with these super-smart guys that are really behind the UFC and want to grow the sport is a lot of work, but it’s very cool.”
When asked what keeps him around, what keeps him putting in countless hours and miles in the air, White did not hesitate to answer, “The thing that drives me is that there’s so much left to do, and I’m so arrogant about it, I honestly believe that nobody else can do it; I honestly believe that.”
With that being said, the UFC president was quick to add, “The UFC can live without me, this is like McDonalds.”
After expressing his confidence that the UFC could go on without White, he said he had no plans of seeing that scenario play out. “Not now. Not right now I don’t,” he stated. “I know what I want to do. I still know what needs to be done. Once I do that, I’m pretty comfortable with saying OK.”
When will that be? According to White, that day is “still seven or eight years away.” It will be a strange day when we see a UFC broadcast without White sitting cageside, without White breaking up tussles at the weigh-ins, without White strapping the belt around the winner of a championship main event.
You don’t have to like the guy, but you do have to admit that Dana White’s tireless work has helped grow the sport of mixed martial arts into what it is today. It’s going to be a strange day when someone else is sitting in the UFC headquarters in the president’s office.
**All quotes obtained firsthand by Bleacher Report MMA.
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