Dana White talks 2020

Justin M. Bowen

UFC president Dana White offers a range of emotions during a recent interview about his mixed martial arts organization’s historic 100th event.

By Brett Okamoto

Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009 | 4:03 p.m.

The following was pulled from comments made by UFC president Dana White during a conversation with the Las Vegas Sun.

This last year was a big one for mixed martial arts.

The sport was just sanctioned in Massachusetts and Vancouver. We’re going to get it done in Ontario in New York in 2010. We’re working on taking the UFC global. We’ve already done Germany, England and Ireland and we just sold 22,000 seats for an event in Australia in 15 minutes.

That said: Las Vegas is the Mecca for fighting.

Between the UFC and our sister company the WEC, the economic impact fighting has in Las Vegas is astronomical. And I’m from here. I lived in Boston for awhile, I love it too, but the reality is I’m from Las Vegas.

Every time I walk through the back of the MGM Grand or Mandalay Bay, valet parkers and waiters will stop me and say, ‘Dana, thank you for bringing the event here this weekend.’ That’s when these guys make their money. We bring a lot of people into town for these events and we bring them regularly.

People were saying I was a lunatic 10 years ago, but this thing is going to be the biggest sport in the world. The stuff we’re working on right now on so many levels is mindboggling.

The reason I say that is, think about this. Right now in the United States, there is nothing bigger than the NFL. It is huge. But the NFL has been spending billions of dollars trying to break into other countries and it’s not working. You know why? Because these people in other countries don’t care about American football. They didn’t grow up playing it and they’re not invested in American teams.

I take two guys and put them in an octagon and they can use any martial art they want — that transcends all culture barriers. Right now we are on some form of television in over 175 countries. We’re all human beings and we all get fighting.

The UFC will be on network television by 2020, but we’re not going to go out and do a stupid deal because we don’t need them. We built this thing without help from anybody and that’s why the UFC has been able to flourish even in these hard times.

The greatest challenge is time. There’s not enough time in the day to do all the things we need to do. That’s basically the toughest part. And throwing more bodies at it isn’t the answer. Me and Lorenzo Fertitta will sit down and figure out a game plan for the next 10 years and we’ll execute it.

Moving forward, the Fertittas have already shown they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is. When we were about $20 million in the hole, Lorenzo called me one day and said he couldn’t do it anymore. He told me to get on the street and figure out what we could get for this thing. I called him back that night and said somewhere in between $4 million and $7 million dollars. He called me back the next day and had changed his mind and wanted to keep going. The Fertittas believed in this thing, they put money into it and, when things went bad, they put more money into it.

Is 2020 enough time to make this the biggest sport in the world? Yeah. Hell yeah.

Brett Okamoto can be reached at 948-7817 or brett.okamoto@lasvegassun.com. Also follow him on twitter: LVSunFighting.