UFC's Dana White Talks Noche UFC, Boxing, UFC 331 & More I Full Interview I The Rich Eisen Show

Dana White came back to the show for the first time in ten years and spent most of the hour explaining how he intends to fix a sport he spent 25 years competing against.

The occasion is a Saturday that requires two time zones. On September 12, Noche UFC runs in Glendale, Arizona at Desert Diamond Arena with a main card starting at 5 Eastern, and then Ryan Garcia against Conor Benn that night at T-Mobile in Las Vegas. White will physically be at both. He did the same thing last year, and he was grateful for the geography this time. "Thank God this year it's in Arizona and not Texas."

Both events stream exclusively on Paramount Plus, which White pointed out is laid out so a viewer never has to move. Noche UFC runs straight into the boxing card without a channel change.

That detail sent him back to the origin of all of it. When his group bought the UFC in 2001, some people came into his office with a computer and a pitch about a new thing called streaming. "They push play and it went buffering, buffering, buffering, played 3 seconds, buffering. I'm like, oh yeah, this is going to be huge."

His forecast now is that the whole thing loops back around. White grew up with channels 3, 5, 8 and 13, then cable arrived in high school and delivered 30 of them. "I think we're going to go back to channel 3, channel 5, channel 8, channel 13 over the next several years, but it will be global." Paramount, YouTube, Netflix. A handful of channels again, only planetary.

On boxing, he was candid that he did not know whether he would enjoy promoting it, and that everyone he consulted made him question his sanity. "Every time I would think about getting into boxing, I'd get on the phone with some of these boxing guys and I'm like, am I out of my mind?"

Six months in, the answer is that he is having fun, and that the job is easier than expected for an unflattering reason. "I'm two years further along than I thought it would be, because it's so messed up and so broken." He has signed real talent quickly, including Jai Opetaia, who White called without a doubt the best 200 pound fighter in the world, sitting in the co-main event.

What he actually diagnosed, though, was not the fighters. It was the night out.

"One of the things that was broken about boxing was the live event. When you would go to the live event, you wouldn't leave a boxing event and go, wow, that was a great experience." Michael Irvin, sitting alongside, backed him up from the customer side, saying UFC crowds are looser and having more fun, which is what got him hooked in the first place.

Both men reached for the same era as the counterexample. Irvin remembered getting dressed up and walking the long hallway for the Tyson fights, when the whole night was a show. White's addition was the punchline attached to it. "The problem is the show only lasted 30 seconds." He was serious about the rest of it. "What Tyson brought to the fight game, I don't know if that will ever be matched again."

Asked how you engineer that experience back into existence, White started with the thing that is not production at all. "Number one, first, the matchmaking." Every fight, from the opener to the main event, has to be a real fight. After that comes technology and production, where his standard is internal. "We always try to raise the bar. We're always trying to beat ourselves."

Irvin pressed on matchmaking specifically, because that is the complaint boxing fans have carried for decades. White's answer identified the incentive rather than the personalities, and it was the sharpest thing he said all hour.

"It's not like the best don't want to fight the best in boxing. They do. The problem was the business was so fragmented." What followed is the mechanism. "Every time these guys would put on a fight, it was like a going out of business sale. They'd try to go grab as much money as they could and then they'd run away and disappear for a year and come back."

His model does the opposite and reinvests, and the visible result is records that mean something. No more letting fighters dodge each other for years so everyone arrives undefeated. "You know, 17 and 0 with 15 knockouts. We have some of these kids now that are 8 and 0, 9 and 0, fighting each other at 8 and 0."

He also wants the sport younger, which is a strange thing for the man who took its audience. When the UFC started, he was told he would never be as big as boxing. "Well, boxing has gotten a lot older and the UFC is very young." Now his young fans sample boxing and file the obvious complaint, that ten or twelve rounds is a long time when you are used to three or five.

On the fight he came to promote, White laid out stakes that run in both directions. Benn is already a big star in the UK. Garcia just won the title and is a big star domestically. "If Garcia can win this fight in spectacular fashion, this guy could be the face of boxing. And if Benn pulls off the upset, which people believe, he's the big underdog in this thing, he will be a massive superstar in the UK."

The larger project sits underneath that. "Boxing has become a very European sport. All the big fighters and all the big fights always happen over there. American boxing has plummeted in the last 10 years." So the plan is to put on good fights, sign the best talent and rebuild the American side of it.

Rich raised the awkward part, which is that White runs the sport that took boxing's pipeline. White did not dispute it. Over 25 years, kids who would have boxed decided to become mixed martial artists instead. His response is that the pipeline is not empty, it is unwatched. There are thousands of kids boxing, and the Vegas card is stacked with young talent precisely because "you have to showcase everybody, not just the main event."

Then he named the habit he intends to break, and it is a cultural one. "People show up for the first fight of the night for UFC fights. In boxing, everybody just shows up for the main event. We're going to fix that too."

Asked what sport he revives next, White shut it down. "I don't have the bandwidth or the time to pick up any other sports right now." He just turned 57 and called this the busiest year of his career. Before the week he was home for, he had been home four days in two months. His three kids, 24, 25 and 20, are on their own paths and not joining the business, which he framed as the point. "You don't ever want your kids involved in your business."

He also gave the most human reason for stopping. He wants to keep a few things he can simply enjoy. As a Celtics and Patriots fan, "I like when I get to be a fan and actually just go enjoy myself and not sweat the entire event."

The venue conversation produced the best stretch of the interview. White noted that the UFC holds eight of the top ten all-time gates at Madison Square Garden, with dates in November and next year that should make it ten of ten within two years.

Rich asked what the hardest event was to stage, floating the Sphere. White said the Sphere is expensive and technically difficult and, contrary to his expectation, nobody has followed them there. But it was not the hardest.

The hardest was the White House, and the reason is that a lawn is not an arena. "We had to build an arena on the lawn that slopes like this," plus a second setup on the ellipse across the street, which held 85,000 people the night of the fight.

Then came the weather story. The UFC was not checking a local forecast. They were getting briefings from a military meteorologist, which Rich correctly identified as the guy who determines whether the country goes to war based on the weather. The verdict was unambiguous. A storm was hitting, damage was coming, everything would be soaked. White's team prepared to repair and dry the entire site overnight.

"The storm comes, when it gets to the White House, it breaks in half and goes around the White House and the ellipse and then keeps going. Not one drop of rain fell. The wind stopped. It was the craziest thing ever."

He also preemptively handled the response he knew was coming. "All the conspiracy theorists now are like, oh yeah, the government does control the weather. Believe me when I tell you, they do not. We thought we were going to get wiped out."

Irvin's memory of that night was about the crowd rather than the production. He spent it with service members and their families, and it clearly stayed with him. "That was the true America's team."

As for where White would go if logistics were no object, the answer was immediate and slightly wistful. Hawaii has been one of the UFC's biggest markets since day one and has produced multiple world champions, and they have never held an event there because the infrastructure cannot support it. A new arena is due around 2028 or 2029. "Who doesn't want to go to UFC Hawaii? Every staff member I have working is going to want to work that event."

Before he left, Brockman got a Celtics question in about the Jaylen Brown trade. White's read was that the absence of anger is the story. "Everybody seems happy. Nobody's mad."

Which led somewhere neither of them expected to agree. White's favorite building to watch the Celtics in is Philadelphia, and not because it is comfortable. "I go in there with all my gear on, and the whole time I'm there, everybody's yelling at me. I just love that type of atmosphere." Irvin, who has received the same welcome for different reasons, recognized a kindred experience immediately.