Why not Dana White
By: Joshua JaramilloBoxing is no stranger to bending morals for personal gain.
In the days of black and white video, the mob fixing fights was all the rage, boiling down to more of an unspoken secret that we as fans swept under the rug unless a decision we personally disagreed with was undertaken by a fight official.
Forever, we have allowed the squared circle to find itself marred by a plague of drug cheats, domestic abusers, and outright criminals, with but the smallest slaps of wrists arriving to those unfortunate enough to be caught.
Hell, it doesn’t stop at the fighters.
Promoters have always been out for themselves.
Don King notoriously abused, cheated, and brutalized anyone who dared to even ask for equal compensation.
(One will note that he stomped a man who owed him money to death on a street that is now named for him.)
In ultra-recent memory, the Irish drug cartel was found to be one of the major power brokers in this sport.
Even at this very moment, a bloodthirsty, outright immoral Saudi regime plays with our beloved sporting heroes as if they were action figures, in order to better their image.
So why not Dana White?
Checking most of the boxes off in terms of abuses of base morality, it’s not surprising to see that he’d take the door opened by Turki Al-Sheikh to shit in another pool.
One can only hope that his history of manipulating rankings, grossly underpaying fighters, and his vested interest in building a fight promotion around him (a man who never fought in anything!) is enough to turn off fans.
It won’t, of course, especially with the promise to fans that the ‘best will fight the best’.
Of course, with ‘his excellency’ footing the bill, maybe we keep seeing these ‘cards of the century’, with the compromise of having a tomato plastered all over the promotion.
There’s an issue with entertaining this beyond the novelty. Eventually, there’ll no longer be stars to treat like action figures. Eventually, Turki Al-Sheikh’s overlords will no longer be content footing the bill for minimal return.
Maybe ‘his excellency’ gets fed up with twitter trolls and blows it all up.
Then, the vultures that remain can pick the bones off of what’s left to nobody’s benefit.
Which is why I encourage Dana White (for the moment) entering this space. He’s not subtle, he’s all the scummiest aspects of this sport and others rolled into one, visually displeasing figure. He’s the nastiest, fattest vulture imaginable, a premonition of what is to come following the exit of Turki Al-Sheikh’s blank cheques.
Nobody really wants Dana White.
As much as the larger casual audience might prefer ‘the best fighting the best’, the present product of the UFC is as laughable as the pittance the organization pays its fighters. There are always insidious power brokers in our sport. But for a variety of reasons, fans are generally resigned to their presence, regardless of initial outrage.
Hopefully with a figure as repulsive as Dana White, the public will not only finally lay waste to his business model but perhaps wake up to the culture that allows figures like him to succeed.
