Dana White doesn't mince words.
Then again, when you oversee an enterprise in which your employees are some of the most lethal human beings on the planet, you can't afford to sugarcoat anything.
It's how the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship keeps order, and how he helped turn a struggling sport into a billion-dollar monolith complete with full health care for fighters and a pension system in which even the most obscure UFC fighter profits from "the brand."
In advance of UFC 133 on Aug. 6 at the Wells Fargo Center, the Daily News sat down with White yesterday over an overpriced salad for a Q & A session regarding bringing the caravan back to Philly and just how much more fans can expect to see out of an outfit that grows by the second.
Daily News: First question, and the one everyone in Philly is dying to have answered, what took you so long to get back here?
Dana White: As we continue to expand and go to not only new countries - and there are still places here in the United States we haven't hit - we're doing Toronto for the first time, Brazil [UFC 134], we just did Milwaukee, Pittsburgh. The way that it normally works for us when we go into a new territory - whether it's a state or a city or a new country - we put on a live event and it really expands our business. Plus, people start opening [mixed martial arts] schools and start training and teaching MMA classes, so our goal is go out there and start hitting all these new territories that we need to hit. But we're back in Philly now and we will continue to come back here.
DN: How much does sanctioning play a role in your efforts to expand? I know you are still trying to get into New York.
DW: We're sanctioned. We're sanctioned everywhere but New York. There are a couple of other states out there that don't have athletic commissions. Our attitude really could be that New York needs us more than we really need New York. We can go anywhere in the world - except for New York. But we are looking at this thing as a global sport and we want to get it done. If that means New York is out of the loop, whatever. I don't know what you know about New York, but it's not the MMA, it's the [athletic] union, the union hates my partners [brothers Lorenzo and Mark Fertitta] because they are the largest non-union gaming company in the country. It's more politics than it is mixed martial arts.
