Dana White vs the Boston Irish Mafia: Discuss

Or: Was Whitey Bulger a better boss than Dana White? Early indicators say YES.

The story’s been told so often you suspect the reason it’s been told so often sits somewhere outside the parameters of why one would tell the story to begin with. But here goes...in the middle of teaching his fairly successful cardiokickboxing class, way back when, in Southie, some men walk up to Dana White, the now CEO of the UFC, and tell him they need to speak to him.

He says, what he feels is somewhat obvious, that he’s in the middle of a class. They just stand there and in the brief seconds between shock and awareness he realizes that he’s talking to Kevin Weeks, the duly appointed representative for Boston Irish mob head Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger.

They ask him for cash, if he wants to continue running a fairly successful cardiokickboxing class. He claims to have no cash. They give him a deadline to come up with the cash he claims to not have. Failure to come up with the cash is precisely the kind of arithmetic that got White’s ass on a plane out of Boston, and so begins the origin-lycra-tights-to-riches story he’s made sure we haven’t forgotten.

Nothing at all wrong with that. Nothing outside of me knowing Kevin Weeks.