Other mixed martial arts promotions don't rate as rivals in the Ultimate Fighting Championship's eyes.
"It's hilarious to me that when all the media and the fans talk about ... Strikeforce and Affliction and IFL and all these other guys that were out there," UFC President Dana White says. "My competition is the NFL. My competition is Major League Baseball. My competition is these other networks."
USA TODAY spoke to White on Wednesday about several topics, including his company's upcoming Toronto debut with UFC 129, managing growth and giving reporters access to his events. Excerpts from the conversation:
Georges St. Pierre is fighting Jake Shields is your main event. If GSP wins this, does he get any consideration as No. 1 pound-for-pound in your book, or is Anderson Silva a lock there until he loses?
This Jake Shields fight is a much bigger fight for Georges St. Pierre than people realize. I know Georges St. Pierre knows it. A lot of people who exactly know what they're talking about and know what they're doing, know what a serious fight this Jake Shields fight is for him and how tough it really is.
There's no doubt that in my book he's the No. 2 pound-for-pound guy in the world. But it's hard to knock Anderson Silva off that.
That's why, if both these guys win their fights, we do the pound-for-pound fight.
So until Anderson loses, you're keeping him at No. 1?
Yeah, exactly.
So is Anderson vs. Yushin Okami set for Rio? Is that the deal?
Yeah.
Co-main event at UFC 129, you've got Jose Aldo vs. Mark Hominick. Who fights the winner of that fight?
Let's see who wins. ... Obviously, it'd be a different fight if Aldo wins; it'd probably be a different fight if Hominick wins. We'll see.
In the past, you offered Aldo a fight at 155. If Aldo wins, how much longer do you think he stays at 145?
That's a good question. He's definitely a guy who could win titles in both weight classes.
Can you see him fighting a guy like Frankie Edgar? I know Frankie has a fight coming up, but just purely from a match-up standpoint?
In the future, yeah, he could definitely fight him. No doubt about it. At '55 or '45.
Do you think Frankie has any interest in dropping down, now that you've absorbed the featherweight division?
No, he actually gets mad at me when I talk about it, and say he's in the wrong weight class, he should be in a totally different weight class. He gets bummed out when I say that.
It used to be a money issue, but now that 145 is in UFC, it shouldn't be, right?
Well, there's probably still bigger fights and bigger money fights at (155). But definitely him and Jose Aldo's big.
Probably the third fight that people are really looking at on this card is Randy Couture-Lyoto Machida. But what do you do with these guys after this fight? Does the winner get closer to a title eliminator? What do you do with a guy like Randy?
I've been saying it forever: I still think Randy's one of the 10 best fighters in the world at 205 pounds. We'll see what happens between him and Machida.
Again, I don't like talking about what guys are going to do after this fight. I don't look past fights. I know they don't. I don't either. ... There's so many different things. I don't know.
What do you like about the Randy-Machida style matchup?
Machida's style that made him Machida and kept him undefeated for so many years -- it almost seems like that style has been backfiring on him lately. I'm interested to see how he comes out and reinvents himself in this Couture fight and how he looks.
The thing about Couture that I love, he is the master of figuring out game plans on how to beat people. He really does. If he can go out there and beat Lyoto Machida, it's so huge for his legacy and everything else.
You seem to be a bit more open to the idea of interpromotional fights if fans wants it. Which Strikeforce champ could you see getting first crack at a UFC star?
I'm not in the interpromotional fights now ...
Well, which Strikeforce fighter will we see in UFC?
If guys' contracts expire over there, I can sign them.
But you still wouldn't bring, say, Gilbert Melendez in to fight one of your top guys in UFC?
Not until his contract's up.
What if his contract allows it? Scott Coker says there's no contractual impediment to having Strikeforce guys fighting in UFC.
I agree, but we have a contract with Showtime. I could see going that way before I could see guys coming this way.
So you could send, say, Randy to fight Dan Henderson?
(chuckles) That's funny.
Just throwing that out there.
Hey, you know my position on the friends thing.
You decided to attend Strikeforce's first major show after the acquisition. You said you didn't want to make people feel uncomfortable in the locker room. When did you decide that wouldn't happen if you showed up?
I didn't go to the first (Challengers) show. ... Listen, I own the (freaking) thing. At some point, you've got to get over it, you know what I mean?
So who's more powerful, you or Lorenzo Fertitta?
(chuckles) If you really want to get into it, I guess if it came down to that, Lorenzo owns more of the company than I do. But it's really not like that.
Lorenzo and I have a great relationship. And Frank (Fertitta). If you're going to have the most powerful people, it would have to be the three of us.
He (Frank Fertitta) focuses on Stations (Casinos), but when we're making big decisions, he's involved.
How do you divide up responsibility day-to-day?
It all just kind of works out. We have our things that we're either good at or not good at, and things we like to do and don't like to do. The way it works out, it's perfect.
When you think about it, to make something successful, you have to have all the right ingredients, and one of the biggest things is the relationship itself. ... First and foremost, we're friends and we have a great relationship. We just get (crap) done.
So what are you good at?
Who knows? Who knows what I'm good at. I don't know. I love this (crap) and for me to sit around and talk about what I think I'm good at is a little weird for me.
Well, you said that's how you divide it up. So...
Yeah, we do. We do.
Here's what I'm not good at: Sitting in (freaking) meetings all day. I don't have the attention span. I've got ADD. So I can't sit in meetings all day.
Lorenzo? Lorenzo's a meeting machine. He knocks out all these meetings. Then me and Lorenzo get together later and he updates me on what happens in these meetings, and we pull the trigger and make decisions.
Now that you just bought your biggest remaining rival, do you feel like you have to pay attention to what anybody else thinks anymore?
Who was I paying attention to before?
I don't know. You tell me.
I didn't. I haven't paid attention to anybody. Never, in the whole time that I was doing this. We kept our head down and kept doing our thing.
Six years ago, you and Pride Fighting Championships were the two biggest MMA companies on the planet. If Pride hadn't run into its own troubles and remained viable, there still might be two big companies instead of one. Is that a situation you could have lived with?
Yeah. We lived with it for a long time. ... The reality is, there really hasn't been anything (as a credible rival) since Pride.
Pride was the one that was the big competition. They put on all these big fights. They actually created stars, much like we do.
Could I have lived with that? I did live with it. I lived with it for years.
It's fun. I like the competition. I love it. I (freaking) thrive on it. That's the (crap) that gets me up in the morning. Make no (freaking) mistake about it. I am a competitor and I like to compete.
And we do it in lots of things. It's not just other organizations that are out there or other fight companies.
It's for pay-per-view numbers. For ratings on television. For sponsorships. For everything. Everything that you do when you own business is you compete.
Not to mention the fact that I also feel like we compete against other sports leagues. We look at other sports leagues and say, "Ok, we can be this big or bigger. How do we do it? How do we get up every day and work and push the envelope and take it to the next level?"
It's hilarious to me that when all the media and the fans talk about stuff -- when you guys talk about Strikeforce and Affliction and IFL and all these other guys that were out there. Come on, if that's seriously what you guys think is our (freaking) competition, you guys are (freaking) way out of the loop. Way, way, way, way out of the (freaking) loop.
My competition is the NFL. My competition is Major League Baseball. My competition is these other networks.
I look much bigger than that.
You like to control things in your business. At what do you think the business becomes too big for you and your partners to continue exercising the kind of control over the product that you prefer?
Never. You can't do that. You can't let that happen. The day you lose control of your business is the day you lose control of your business.
Right. But some guys deal with it just by capping their own growth.
We'll never do that. We'll never be those guys.
We'll never be the guys that were sitting in some ivory tower and we don't know what's going on downstairs; don't know what's going on in Toronto, don't know what's going on over in London; don't know what's going on over in Beijing.
We're on top of everything, every second of every day. We don't take days off. There's no such thing as a day off. There's no holidays. There's nothing. We're on the phone, and all we do is eat, sleep and breathe this every day, all day. That's all we do.
I understand that, but there's no rapidly growing business that doesn't reach a point where it's hard to manage. What's that point for Zuffa?
I don't know. We keep going. We keep pushing. We keep moving on. We keep building the sport.
I just can't see that day happening. I won't let it happen. Neither will Lorenzo; Lorenzo's not built that way either.
And finally, something that's been generating some discussion in recent days -- Sports Illustrated did something on it -- regarding your media credentialing. Now that UFC's credential policies have been extended to Strikeforce, some folks (Loretta Hunt, Josh Gross and Sherdog.com staff) that used to cover Strikeforce now can't...
Why can't they? Nobody said they couldn't.
Right, but can't as a credentialed journalist.
They could buy a ticket. Listen -- and credentials? I don't have to credential anybody. Credentials aren't mandatory. Credentials are at our discretion on who we want to credential.
It doesn't stop them from covering the event at all. She could have absolutely flown out, got a ticket to the fight and covered the event, and then gone back to the host hotel and interviewed every fighter on Earth. There's no way that she couldn't have covered it. And same thing with Josh or whoever else who's part of that thing.
Let me just make sure I make the record clear here. There's all these things out there where, "Dana White didn't like stories that they wrote because the stories they wrote wouldn't go in his PR press clip."
Are you (freaking) kidding me? Far from it. There's been lots of people that say bad things.
It's one thing if you give your opinion and your opinion is accurate and based on fact, which makes you a real journalist, but you have to understand a lot of these people ... I've never had any dealings with you where you've act(ed) unprofessional and where you've done things, as far as media goes, were bush league. Both of them have.
Both of them have, and have numerous times. It goes way back to the days before this stuff was even covered by USA TODAY or any of the other majors. It was back in the bush-league days, and these guys did some stuff that was dirty -- dirty, dirty, dirty -- and very unprofessional.
And they will not be credentialed in a company that I run. Period. End of story. People can sit around and cry about it or whatever.
In no way shape or form do I stop these guys from covering the sport. There's many other ways to cover the sport. There's lots of people who don't get credentialed for lots of sporting events who still cover the sport and figure it out. They're just going to have to get off their lazy (butt)s and figure it out themselves.
I'm not sending a limo to pick them up, all-access credential and everything else, for them to see a UFC or Strikeforce event.
The counterargument to that is if Zuffa wants mainstream acceptance, then it ought to let mainstream outlets like CBS or ESPN determine who covers events. The NFL doesn't single out individual reporters from covering an event. Why not let CBS or ESPN determine who they want to send?
Are you sure about that, that other leagues don't (ban individual reporters)? You don't think they have problems with some reporters that have done bad stuff that popped up from the Internet somewhere?
Me and my partners are in this business now almost 11 years, back when the Internet was just booming. A lot of these guys who are now so-called reporters came from these crappy little websites.You think these guys were making money off content, meaning off stories they wrote? No, they used to sell UFC DVDs and they used to sell all kinds of other merchandise on their sites, which is how they made their money, which is how this entire beef started.
Believe me, if I really sit down -- and maybe I'll do it with somebody on camera sometime -- and explain where these people came from, and how this beef really started, it's actually pretty sickening. And a lot of people -- if not everybody, including all the journalists -- I think would absolutely 100% agree with me and take my side.
I don't give a (crap). I don't give a (crap) what anybody thinks. I don't care. I can decide who gets a credential and who doesn't. ESPN should be more careful about who they hire.
Listen, how many times have you interviewed me? Leading up to a fight, I do 1,000 interviews. Do you think I go and read them all? Do you think that I care? If I cared, I wouldn't talk like this. This wouldn't be my response. My response would be something that my attorney wrote.
Your opinion tomorrow in USA TODAY could be, "I can't stand this guy; he's a moron; he's an idiot; he's this and he's that." That's your opinion. You can think whatever you want of me.
But if you went out and started writing stuff about my company that was untrue; and that you didn't do your homework and was absolutely wrong? Then yes, I would have a very big problem with you.
