At a time when everything has gone political, sports leagues forcing their opinions and woke ideologies on fans and athletes alike has become the norm. UFC President Dana White is different.
While the NBA openly embraces “Black Lives Matter,” and Major League Baseball kowtows to the woke mob, outraged over Georgia’s election laws, White wants fans of the UFC to come to his events knowing that they don’t have to worry about political messaging. He wants his sport to be true to its original intention — standing as a place for fans to get away from it all and simply enjoy the spectacle.
“When you watch sports, you’re tuning in to get away from all the crap that’s going on in your life,” White told Candace Owens in an exclusive interview airing Friday night on Candace. “Whether it’s personal, professional, political, whatever’s going on in the world. That’s your time where you tune in. Never once did we talk about COVID, we didn’t talk politics, we didn’t talk about anything negative that was going on. When you come in and you watch two or three hours of our fights, you’re tuning in for fights. You’re coming in to watch a sport. You want to hear all that crap, watch any other channel.”
Have your own opinions? That’s fine as well. The UFC wants no part of telling its athletes what they should and should not believe.
“It’s like we live in this world right now where nobody’s allowed to have their own opinion,” White added. “These are all grown men and women that fight for us. They all have their own beliefs, their own politics or whatever it is. They can say whatever they want to say, to a point. I mean, there’s some times that some things cross the line, but at the end of the day, too, this is the fight business. Guess what? They say really mean things to each other.”
White understands that not everyone holds the same political views and not everyone is going to agree. It’s an approach that White and the UFC have carefully curated for years, and in a world where anything you say can get you cancelled, it’s quite refreshing.
“It’s what we do, whether all this craziness is going on or not, that’s how we run our show,” White told The Daily Wire when asked how the UFC has managed to stay out of politics. “The other thing is, we don’t put a muzzle on anyone. We don’t tell people what they can and cannot talk about. Imagine working for a company and they’re telling you to believe this.”
“And the other thing we don’t do, we don’t tell you who to vote for. We don’t tell you what to believe in, we don’t tell you what religion, we don’t tell you any of that s**t. You’re all grown men and women with your own ideas, your own beliefs, and good for you.”
As large corporations and “Big Tech” companies continue to regulate their employees’ way of thinking, White and the UFC have gone the opposite way.
“It’s America. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. And you shouldn’t have to go to work and listen to that s**t,” White told The Daily Wire. “What I believe should not be rained on you because I run this company. And it’s not like that at all. We don’t tell anybody what to do, who to vote for. We don’t even throw out suggestions or anything else. Any of that stuff. We try and keep all of that stuff away from our people.”
Joe Morgan is the Sports Reporter for The Daily Wire. Most recently, Morgan covered the Clippers, Lakers and the NBA for Sporting News.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.