STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
People at the White House will soon witness another first. Workers will build a temporary outdoor arena on the lawn. And on President Trump's birthday, June 14, he plans to host cage matches for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It's run by Trump's friend, Dana White.
What does that event mean for you and for the UFC?
DANA WHITE: Well, if you look at our humble beginnings and where we came from - meaning that when we bought the company in January of 2001, we weren't even allowed on paper view. Venues didn't want us and many other negative things, stigma that was attached to the sport and the athletes.
INSKEEP: John McCain called it human cockfighting, once upon a time.
WHITE: There you go.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
WHITE: Perfect, there you go.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
WHITE: Yeah, that's where we were then. And now we're on the South Lawn of the White House.
INSKEEP: Dana White has built the UFC into a multibillion-dollar business and a cultural force. He talked with us in a video interview for the NPR program Newsmakers. We met at a sports arena in Newark, New Jersey, during preliminaries for a UFC event.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Please, welcome the UFC lightweight champion, El Matador, Ilia Topuria.
INSKEEP: People lined up around the block just to see the fighters at a press conference. Afterward, I sat with White overlooking the octagon, where the fighters meet to throw punches, wrestle and kick. White is a one-time boxer who hung up his gloves early.
WHITE: I realized that I wasn't the guy. You wouldn't have seen me fighting in a title fight.
INSKEEP: You weren't going to be Rocky?
WHITE: Hundred percent. Yeah.
INSKEEP: So he became a manager and then met investors who backed his acquisition of the UFC. The fights do have rules. Many acts are off-limits, such as gouging an opponent's eye. But White is frank about the risks, including long-term brain injuries.
WHITE: It's an inevitable side effect of this business. You know, when you get punched in the head, it's not good for you. And everybody going into this knows it's not.
INSKEEP: In the early 2000s, the UFC couldn't find a venue until Donald Trump welcomed it at one of his Atlantic City casinos. Today, the UFC has grown so much that its streaming deal with Paramount+ is worth more than $1 billion per year.
Has the UFC, after all these years, become an expression of your personality? It is you and you are it?
WHITE: Me?
INSKEEP: Yeah, you.
WHITE: I would say that the live event and the television side, I have honed and sort of dialed in over the last 25 years. But this sport has its own personality. And basically, whoever you are and where you're from, that's what I'm selling.
INSKEEP: You're talking about a fighter. Who are you as a person?
WHITE: Exactly.
INSKEEP: It's a story.
WHITE: Who are you and where do you come from? That's what I sell every Saturday night.
INSKEEP: The fighters White is sending to the White House come from many backgrounds and speak several languages. At the top of the card is Ilia Topuria, the defending lightweight champion, whose family were refugees from Georgia. His challenger used to work in a copper mine.
Is that representative of the UFC, people who maybe in some way are on the bottom in society, and they're using sports to fight their way up?
WHITE: A hundred percent. Like most, you know, most sports, people that are this tough come from some tough backgrounds.
INSKEEP: Immigrants, people who don't speak English as their first language.
WHITE: Right.
INSKEEP: On and on.
WHITE: Well, one of the things that I, you know, believed about the UFC in the early days was no matter what country you come from, what color you are, what language you speak, we're all human beings. Fighting is in our DNA. We get it and we like it.
INSKEEP: Some people are going to be listening to this and think there may be a bit of a contradiction because we've been talking about how your fighters are often immigrants, even a refugee, in the case of your champion fighter who's going to be at the White House. These are people, not universally, but in large measure, the president wants out of the country.
WHITE: And that's not necessarily true either. What the president wants is what everybody has talked about, including the Democrats back in the day. You have to get documented the right way. I don't think the president has ever said he doesn't want...
INSKEEP: Well...
WHITE: ...People from other countries coming in.
INSKEEP: He has said...
WHITE: If you do it the wrong way, yes.
INSKEEP: In his first term, he did talk about legal immigration and being in favor of legal immigrants. But in the second term, they've actually canceled a lot of people's legal status. They've taken refugees and said it's time to go. I was actually wondering, as I was watching your fighters at this press conference here, some of them, I wondered if they've come to you and said, I got a problem with my aunt, I got a problem with my brother, can you help me?
WHITE: There's one. A kid that retired from here who hit me up last week. And he had a problem with his wife. But he said, you know, it was 110% our fault in how this ended up happening, but can you help?
INSKEEP: And?
WHITE: (Laughter) I don't think I can help, no.
INSKEEP: White did not ask his friend in the White House for help in that case, although he says Trump did once help a fighter's wife who was arrested in Russia.
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WHITE: That's the President Trump that I know, a man who truly cares about people.
INSKEEP: In 2024, Dana White spoke at the Republican convention. Analysts thought he helped Trump appeal to the young men who are the core audience for the UFC. He spoke again at a victory celebration in November. But then he said he was done with politics.
WHITE: I don't like it. I think it's dirty, especially after seeing what happened to him, you know, going into that second election, the things the media said about him. And I'm in the fight business, my whole life, and I just think politics is the nastiest business there is.
INSKEEP: But does the White House event bring you right back into politics? It's on Trump's birthday.
WHITE: It landed on Trump's birthday. It's the 250th birthday of America.
INSKEEP: It's coming up. Yeah, yeah, true. It's flag day. It's flag day.
WHITE: Well, it's not coming up. That's what we're celebrating (laughter).
INSKEEP: OK. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
WHITE: Yeah. We're celebrating America's 250th birthday on the lawn of the White House. And, you know, there possibly couldn't be a greater honor than that, especially for me as an American. And I think that everybody thought that I was going to build a card, America versus the world, where we did the exact opposite. America is a country of immigrants that all came from somewhere else. And they're all going to be represented. I tried hard to have a Chinese fighter on the card, too, but didn't work out.
INSKEEP: I want to underline that for people who don't follow this. Like, the old-time WWF was, you know, there's the Iron Sheik. And people could hate the foreigner.
WHITE: Right.
INSKEEP: And you're saying you didn't want to do that.
WHITE: Well, it wasn't about that. That wasn't my thought process. But it was, you know, everybody thought that there was going to be - it's the Fourth of July, it's the 250th birthday of America - an American versus, you know, a foreigner where hopefully all Americans win and America feels - you know? No, we did the exact opposite. We are a global sport.
INSKEEP: Dana, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this.
WHITE: Likewise, sir. Thanks for coming out.
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INSKEEP: Dana White spoke on video for the NPR series Newsmakers. In the full conversation, we talk about head injuries and when he has to tell fighters it's time to give it up. You can see it on the NPR app and on YouTube.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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