Dana White's old home town paper does a lavish feature on the local boy made big, from the Boston Globe:
White was born in Manchester, Connecticut, spent his early years in Ware, Massachusetts, and grew up in Vegas with his mother and sister. As a kid, he loved boxing but didn't always channel his aggression the right way. He was more of a punk than a delinquent and got kicked out of the same Catholic high school twice (the second time for repeatedly kicking a nun's classroom door shut). He wound up finishing his senior year in Levant, Maine, where his grandparents lived. After graduating, he went back to Vegas for a little while. When his mother, a nurse, moved to Boston, he went to visit her and decided to make the move, too. He got a job as a doorman at the Black Rose in Faneuil Hall, got fired for fighting, took a job paving roads, then worked as a bellman at the Boston Harbor Hotel. The money was good, but he wanted to get back into boxing, so he sought out Peter Welch, a legendary Southie boxer, to become his trainer. At first, Welch didn't want anything to do with him."There are guys that come to me all the time and say they want to be a fighter," Welch says, so he'll always put them right in the ring and hope taking a couple punches will get them out the door again. "But that wasn't Dana. From the first blow he took on his chin he proved he had the stuff to stick around the game."
They trained in the McDonough Gym, an old boxing dive behind the courthouse in Southie, and White went to school in the ring and on the corners. "People always ask me about going to college," says White, who dropped out of UMass-Boston after a few classes. "I went to the University of South Boston, that's where I went. I learned the fight business there. I became a part of that neighborhood. Obviously there's a lot of great things I can tell you about Southie, but let's face it, Southie's streets - there was some hardcore stuff there."
The article goes on to relate the oft-told tale of how the Boston mob ran Dana out of town.
The story also repeats the infamous "Zuffa Myth" that the sport was unregulated, had no rules, no rounds and really nothing going for it before Dana White and the Fertittas bought the UFC in 2001.
The piece also has a rare portrait of his family life:
His boys, Dana, 9, and Aidan, 8, start having a fight with foam swords in the living room. Dad jumps in with some foam nunchuks and loses to the boys. They both study MMA. His wife, Anne, whom White has known since the eighth grade, is sitting on the couch watching The Hangover with one of White's uncles. White's 3-year-old daughter, Savannah, chases their two little dogs. His father stops in, as does his sister-in-law and her daughter. They order some pizzas, and White goes out to meet the delivery guy. A few minutes later, the guy calls back and tells White he gave him way too much money. White tells him it was no mistake; the guy says he can request him in the future.
And his notorious gambling habits:
We sit at the table. White is wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and Adidas Gazelles, which is what all the Southie guys wore back when he was one of them. He plays $25,000 in his first hand and wins. He looks at me and says his life is actually pretty simple: He does his job, he spends time with his kids, and he plays cards to relax. It's just that the stakes are different now. Forty minutes later, Dana White has lost a half-million dollars like it's nothing. Because it is. He's won and lost a million plenty of times, he says.
Two take-aways here:
* As always Zuffa's PR machine is pushing Dana White as the star of the UFC rather than any of the fighters. It's a tactic they picked up from Vince McMahon and the WWE and it works for the promotion.
* The gambling. Jesus. It does not bode well for the future of the sport that the man who has amassed near-monopoly control over MMA at the top-levels is a degenerate gambler.
Source: http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2010/8/1/159 ... the-boston
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