Dana White Children: Meet Dana, Savannah, and Aidan

Publish date: 2024-05-14

Dana White Children: Meet Dana, Savannah, and Aidan – Dana White enrolled in college twice after graduating from Hermon High School in 1987, once at Quincy College and once at UMass Boston, but dropped out both times during his first semester.

During this time, he worked as an asphalt installer, a bouncer at an Irish bar, and a bellhop at the Boston Harbor Hotel. White began boxing at the age of 17 and became friends with former Golden Gloves champion Peter Welch.

White decided to enter the fight business as a result of this relationship, and he and Welch opened a boxing gym in Boston. White had planned to become a professional boxer, but was put off after seeing a punch drunk boxer and fearing he would suffer the same neurodegeneration, and it is on record that he also worked as a boxercise coach.

White claims he left Boston to return to Las Vegas after receiving threats from mobster Whitey Bulger and his associate Kevin Weeks.

White continued to run boxercise gyms in Las Vegas and began training in jiu-jitsu under John Lewis, alongside Lorenzo Fertitta and his older brother Frank Fertitta III. White met Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell at Lewis’ practices and eventually became their manager.

While working as a manager for Ortiz and Liddell, White met Bob Meyrowitz, the owner of Semaphore Entertainment Group, the parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

When White learned that Meyrowitz was thinking about selling the UFC, he reached out to a childhood friend, Lorenzo Fertitta (an executive and co-founder of Station Casinos, as well as a former commissioner of the Nevada State Athletic Commission), to see if he would be interested in buying the company.

In January 2001, Lorenzo and his older brother Frank paid $2 million for the UFC, which later became a subsidiary of Zuffa. White was named the company’s president.

When White and the Fertittas purchased the UFC, they only received the brand name “UFC” and an old octagon.

The previous owners had sold the UFC.com website to “User Friendly Computers” in order to avoid bankruptcy.

The UFC grew into a highly successful business under White’s leadership, with a gross revenue of $600 million in 2015.

In July 2016, Zuffa was sold for $4.025 billion to a consortium of investors led by WME-IMG. White owned 9% of the company at the time of the sale. White was retained as president and given a stake in the new company.

Due to McGregor’s contract with the UFC, Dana White reportedly entered the boxing scene and he did so by co-promoting Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Conor McGregor. At Freddie Roach’s Wild Card West boxing club in October 2017, White declared that he was “getting into boxing, 100 percent.”

White stated in 2019 that he wanted to add boxing to the UFC’s corporate portfolio. In 2022, he stated that boxing promotion is “a broken business that is an absolute nightmare to try to fix,” reversing his earlier position on these plans.