Dana White reflects on time Vince McMahon prevented UFC from getting NBC deal: “He saw everybody as competition”
Things weren’t always great between UFC executive Dana White and Vince McMahon.
They now work together, as two of the higher-ups of the TKO Group. Founded earlier this year with the UFC-WWE merger, Dana White and Vince McMahon get along just fine these days. However, that wasn’t the case for a long, long time.
Since the deal has been made, the two men have reflected on their time as enemies. While Vince McMahon has given his own stories, Dana White believes that there was a time when the WWE executive was always trying to screw him over. During a recent interview on the Triggered Podcast, he gave one such example.
According to Dana White, before the UFC scored a deal with Fox in 2011, they were in talks with NBC. At the time, Vince McMahon and the WWE had a deal with the company, and as potential competitors, they had a meeting. Apparently, the longtime wrestling promoter completely squashed the idea.
“Vince in his heyday, he saw everybody as competition,” Dana White stated, recalling his past with Vince McMahon in a recent interview. “He was one of those guys who would just f*cking stick it to me, just to do it, for whatever reason. We were about to do a deal with NBC and we got to the one-yard line, and Vince has the final say who can go on USA Network and who can’t if you’re a combat sport. Me and Lorenzo flew out to Connecticut to see him.”
He continued, “We do all the small talk first, then we’re like ‘The reason we’re here is we’re doing a deal with NBC’… ‘You need to sign off on it’, and he was just like ‘Yeah… I’m not going to do that’. Like, why? ‘Oh I’m not interested, I just don’t like the idea of you guys being on USA Network’… That’s one of ten times I can tell you where Vince did it.”
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