Dana White's Big Bucks: The rich & powerful behind Mr. Health & Fitness

How an investigation into "SBJ and Podcasts" unearthed something far stranger than expected.

photo by Andrius Petrucenia  CC BY-SA 2.0

With the UFC antitrust lawsuit settled and the big UFC 300 event upon us, this has been quite a book-end to Dana White’s run as UFC boss. Now he is all about building his legacy.

Dana White has styled himself as being many things to many people. Motivational speaker. Professional hustler. Fight philosopher. Ass-kicking businessman.

But what ultimately motivates Dana White is the same ethos and obsession that motivates Vince McMahon: being perceived as a warlord of health & fitness.

Kings of Vitality.

Going back to the days when The Ultimate Fighter launched, Dana White has been chasing the ghosts from his first career as a boxercise coach.

From screaming “Do you want to be a fucking fighter?!” to filming a reality TV program about a boxing match with Tito Ortiz, long-time MMA fans have watched an awful lot of ludicrous and amusing self-promotion. Many of those fans were on The Underground Forum, the alternate TUF in public if you will.

But no act of self-promotion ever generated as much mockery and ridicule on The Underground as Dana White, Magazine Cover Guy:

One of the most masterful strokes of commercial art that the Fertitta empire marketed during the rise of their UFC empire was to convince the public that MMA was not just a show, it was a lifestyle.

Health and fitness, UFC gyms, training, Tapout, you name it.

Sell the culture.

The campaign perfectly aligned with the egos of management. It allowed Dana to always be on offense because he was the one doing the sales pitch.

There isn’t a better barometer of Dana’s self-esteem than watching him self-promote his physique.

Mr. White’s health status, through his various ups and downs, has been a part of his public persona. Mr. McMahon was all about being inVINCEable 24/7, whereas Dana White loves showing the world how to defy the odds after finding himself in perceived peril.

As Damon Martin chronicled at Bleacher Report, Mr. White went to Germany on the advice of Alex Rodriguez to help find a solution for Meniere’s Disease.

The end of the story is the same as it always seems to be, which is Dana finding the redemption hero arc to vanquish whatever troubles him. You just have to power through it.

Right as Lorenzo & Frank Fertitta were cashing out and selling UFC to one of, if not, the most powerful men on planet Earth, we magically got another Dana White Magazine Cover:

You would think that Mr. White was on top of the world after UFC was sold for $4 billion to Endeavor. Dana had destroyed his enemies and made tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

But a funny thing happened. Mr. White’s run as face of the UFC has been a series of ups and downs.

He started skipping some shows.

He’s dabbled into various side projects and businesses.

Mr. White is bigger than the sport.

He’s larger than life.

The connections with Endeavor allowed Mr. White to build upon an impressive network of celebrities and investors.

Big business.

And yet, it wouldn’t be Dana White without another redemption arc. He needs a challenge to overcome, a dragon to slay.

Falling back on old habits, Mr. White went to his old health and fitness playbook. The best stories involve both reality and exaggeration.

In September of 2021, Men’s Health blasted this beauty of a headline: Dana White shared the workout and diet that keeps him jacked at 52.

“I’m not one of these guys who eats healthy or whatever,” White says. “The reason I work out is because I love food and I love to eat.”

One year later, Dana White was telling the world that he had 10.4 years left to live.

A non-doctor “bio-hacker” named Gary Brecka told him the bad news while in Miami. He was living on borrowed time.

The same guy profiled doing swimming, pilates, weight lifting, cold plunges, and LED beds was now saying a year later that he could barely walk and was having trouble tying his shoes?

This time, the playbook of Mr. Health & Fitness would feature a new wrinkle — a self-imposed selectively closed loop limiting media access.

The man who used to flame any-and-all perceived enemies, from Loretta Hunt to Ariel Helwani, found himself cocooned within an unusual circle of media personalities.

The summation of this strategy was recently elucidated by Mr. White during an interview with Sage Steele.

"If you're somebody like me, you only do Sports Business Journal, right, who you know is credible and you only do podcasts with people who aren't out there trying to go, gotcha! You know what I mean, to get to throw something out there or to post something that isn't true or to try to clickbait and get fast hits."

His repeated rationale of only doing “SBJ and podcasts” for media access immediately raised my antenna.

The man who used to flame war everyone on Twitter ala Tony Khan suddenly restricted himself to interviews with… Theo Von?

We started investigating.