The 15 Seminal Moments of Dana White's Career

Whether you believe he's the scourge of humanity, the patron saint of MMA or somewhere in the yawning middle, UFC President Dana White has carved his likeness into the face of MMA like he was Teddy Roosevelt in the South Dakota granite.

Here are the most seminal moments in White's long-and-winding road to the throne of the UFC and the world of mixed martial arts. I'm not saying they were good. I'm not saying they were bad. I'm just saying they were influential.

Ranking someone's most seminal decisions and achievements is a little like nailing pudding to a wall. To try and narrow it down a bit, I stayed away from individual fighter signings, instead homing in on White's personal and business arcs.

How did he get where he is today? What are some of the specific actions, both deliberate and fortuitous, that shaped his career? How has White helped MMA explode in popularity, with the promotion he runs at the crest of the wave? 

Now, White is far from flawless, and I don't want to sweep his warts under the rug or imply he can do no wrong. At the same time, though, history shows that he often gets it right.

I can't imagine a slideshow about Dana White causing any controversy (noooooooo), but given the highly subjective nature of this and the fact that there might just be more than 15 seminal moments to choose from, please add your voice in the comments if you care to do so.

Thanks for reading.

15. Hello, Toronto

There's a lot of green in the great white north. And if White himself was making this list, this one might just be a lot closer to the top.

You see, Toronto has a somewhat healthy appetite for mixed martial arts. According to the UFC, Toronto is their No. 1 television market on the planet.

That's probably why, when Toronto finally legalized MMA last summer—three months after the UFC opened an office there—White called it the biggest moment of his career.

It also explains why UFC 129, held at Toronto's 55,000-seat Rogers Centre, set new gate and attendance marks for an MMA event staged in North America (breaking the record held by Montreal). And it's probably why only eight months later, for better or worse, the Octagon returns to Toronto for UFC 140.

14. Folding in WEC Makes Octagon Lighter

When Zuffa announced its merger with World Extreme Cagefighting last October, the stated goal was not just another vanquished opponent and a new talent infusion, but the creation of new featherweight and bantamweight divisions in the UFC.

So far, the expansion has gone like gangbusters. Plenty of worthy challengers and a slew of exciting fights have resulted.

But the two lighter weight classes—and their dynamic champions, Jose Aldo and Dominick Cruz—were the real gems of the deal. Given that there are nine MMA divisions (including flyweight and super heavyweight), the expansion increased the UFC’s portfolio from five to seven classes. In other words, the UFC’s market share ballooned by 22 percent.

With future plans to add a flyweight division, it's safe to say the UFC was happy with the outcome on this one.

13. I'm Shipping out of Boston

In the late 1990s, White packed up and left Beantown, as well as the gym he ran there, to avoid extortion by the Irish mob. 

He wound up in Las Vegas, where he began managing fighters and hooked up with a couple of old friends, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta.

I’d say that worked out OK.

12. Remaking the Rules

After purchasing the UFC, Zuffa's first order of business was to get that  "human cockfighting" out of the ring.

Because no one's going to get anything done with John McCain on their backs.

After plunking down a Louisiana Purchase-like $2 million, White and company's manifest destiny was not only to accept regulators into the fold, but welcome them, even help them along in a quest to bring law and order to ultimate fighting's Wild West.

The rules had been slowly but steadily evolving since UFC 1; the move from spectacle to sport was by no means the doing of White alone. But White helped get the process over the goal line. He worked with athletic commissioners, brokering an agreement to ban, for example, kicking downed opponents and striking the spine or back of the head.

Three months after Zuffa purchased the UFC in January 2001, several regulatory bodies, led by the New Jersey State Athletic Commission, adopted the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, which the UFC quickly agreed to follow. Four months later, the UFC held its first sanctioned event in Nevada and returned to pay-per-view. An uptick in sponsorships followed.

The UFC was pulling out of its death spiral.

11. Tito Blinks

Sorry, Tito. Had to include this one.

Back in 2007, Tito Ortiz, angry over his rate of remuneration, challenged White to a three-round boxing match.

White started training, promising to air the fight on pay-per-view.

Not long before the bout, Ortiz backed out for reasons that were a little muddled, to say the least.

Dana 1, Tito 0

10. Bud Light Endorsement Deal

In Feb. 2008, the UFC announced an endorsement deal with Anheuser Busch's Bud Light brand.

It was a new frontier for White and the UFC. Bud Light is a heavy sponsor and promoter of next month's "Battle on the Bayou" in New Orleans. You may have seen the commercials for said event, where Dana White is making all those weird faces and saying "here we go" a lot.

With Pandora's Box open for business, more big sponsorships rolled in, both for the UFC and its fighters.

I'm not going to list all the companies (at least not unless they grease my palms...with money). But feel free at your leisure to examine what you see in the cage, in the commercials and on the fight gear. It ain't all Condom Depot anymore.

9. UFC Rio

White has often repeated that he wants to take the UFC global and eventually compete with soccer for the sporting affections of Planet Earth.

Then, he finally wants to figure out how to work that smoothie machine. You know, just everyday stuff here.

Lofty though it was and is, the vision is slowly taking shape. The UFC has hosted events in England, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and Australia.

But UFC 134 was more than just a foray into the next territory on the map. It was just as much a return to the sport’s roots as it was a market expansion. It was like saying "no matter how big we get, we'll never forget where we came from."

It was a smart move by White, especially in light of Rio securing the 2016 Olympics.

I bet the NFL or NBA wishes it was half as international as the UFC.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Yahoo! Sports)

8. The Fedor That Got Away

Sometimes, the best move is the one you don’t make.

Believing Fedor Emelianenko to be either an irresistible talent or a seraph come to smite their enemies, some hardcore fans howled when White let Emelianenko's M-1 Global management team walk away from the negotiating table.

Since the negotiations ended, Emelianenko has lost three of four.

White isn't a mind reader. After all, he was desperate to sign Fedor. The negotiations only broke down for good once M-1 demanded half of all pay-per-view revenues, a personalized Octagon strewn daily with rose petals, and unlimited energy-drink-fueled sightseeing tours on the back of Rampage Jackson's truck.

The point here is, White could have sold his soul, but he didn't. Just imagine what fans of UFC/M-1 Global would be saying right now if White had traded his kingdom for Fedor.

Maybe it wasn't born out of any great shrewdness or skill. But when this big moment didn't happen, it was a huge rotten egg dodged for the face of the UFC.

7. The Show Must Go on

No doubt inspired by the majestic theatrics of the Pride promotion, White saw that an MMA event could, and probably should, be more than some cameras and an octagonal cage on a casino floor.

I'll let White tell this one in his own words, from a 2006 interview published in Playboy (completely SFW, text-only transcript here):

Playboy: Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta are childhood friends of yours from Las Vegas. In 2001, the three of you teamed up to buy the UFC. What was the first thing you wanted to change when you took over?

White: Before we bought the UFC we went to a fight in New Orleans and sat in the crowd. The old owner didn't care about the in-house show. All he cared about was the pay-television event. He didn't care about selling tickets and building up the in-house show and making it exciting.

Lorenzo and I sat there, saying, "What if we dim the lights when they walk in, play some cool music and get the light shows going?" We knew the first thing we needed to do was make the in-house show cool. We believed a lot of revenue could be made from ticket sales, which the old owner didn't care about because he was more focused on the pay-per-view.

We figured we'd start to build the business from the live show. It ended up being the perfect plan for us. In the early days, when we were just getting this thing off the ground, ticket sales saved our [buttocks].

6. The Ultimate Fighter

When the first episode of The Ultimate Fighter aired Jan. 17, 2005 on Spike TV, a new era began.

With White as ringmaster, TUF attracted hardcore fans with unabridged fight footage, well-known coaches and a chance to go inside what has essentially become a UFC minor league.

But in addition, it offered everyone, casual and serious fans alike, a chance to get to know the fighters outside the cage and the canned interviews. Not to mention a chance to, you know, watch them pee in each other’s lunches.

Scoff all you want, but I have The Ultimate Fighter to thank for making my wife an MMA fan. That’s at least one (and probably two) people right there who would never have bought UFC pay-per-views, tickets and gear—at least not to the extent they do now—if the show had never existed.

Now entering its 14th season (and, not surprisingly, its swan song on Spike), the series easily hauls in 1 million viewers per week, even in the worst of times.

Next season, the show will be reborn on FX and will include live fights.

5. The Spike TV Deal

White has called the Ultimate Fighter his "Trojan Horse" into the American consciousness.

I beg to differ. It was the whole 2004 deal with Spike TV that finally put the UFC on the mainstream map.

It wasn't just TUF that rode into living rooms on Spike's airwaves. UFC Fight Nights, highlight show UFC Unleashed and a host of promotional programming came with it.

Three years after the UFC was not even available on pay-per-view channels, it was now on basic cable. That's a pretty seminal moment.

4. “Come On. These Hot Wings Suck, Anyway.”

Again, White bares all to Playboy magazine (SFW):

One night my partners, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, and I were at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas. We all boxed and had been involved with boxing for a long time. Frank said, "There’s one of those Ultimate Fighter guys." It was John Lewis. We were saying how we wanted to learn submission fighting. I went over because I knew him, and I told him we wanted to hook up with him to learn. So we made an appointment and we all got together and started doing submissions. We got completely addicted to it. We were training three or four days a week, ripping each other’s arms off and doing all kinds of crazy [maneuvers]. That's how we got into the sport and started to love it. Through that I met Liddell and Ortiz. That's how I started managing them.

3. Swallowing Pride

This was the first sign of the future we would all soon be living in, one where the UFC was the NFL of mixed martial arts, and everything else was pure sideshow.

As you know, after this purchase in 2007, Zuffa went on to methodically purchase the WEC, then Strikeforce.

But the biggest MMA rival in UFC's history (at least according to White) was Pride, a promotion with a huge talent stable as well as more permissive rules that turned the intensity up to 11 and appealed greatly to hardcore fans worldwide (still does).

When Pride was sold, the deal was immediately compared with the NFL-AFL merger, with the UFC inheriting a mother lode of stars like Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Wanderlei Silva, Quinton Jackson and Shogun Rua.

2. UFC 100

This is where it all came together for Dana White.

Long an advocate of big, crowd-pleasing, star-studded cards, UFC 100 featured two championship bouts and a host of other anticipated matchups.

Long a proponent of fighters mingling with fans, White instituted the first-ever UFC Fan Expo for the event.

Never one to dislike a camera, White basked in ESPN's "Week of White," which included a slew of interviews, a profile in ESPN The Magazine and a feature on E:60.

According to estimates, the event shattered the previous record for pay-per-view buys.

As evidenced again by UFC Rio, White seems to like using his events to make statements. The statement at UFC 100?  We've arrived.

1. UFC Signs Deal with Fox

Not sure what else to add to the reams already spilled on this, other than to echo the popular (if not universal) sentiment that this was the biggest business blockbuster in UFC history.

White seems to think so, anyway.

And I'll go with him on this one. After all, he's the one who got it done.