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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Dana White doesn’t live with many regrets, but he almost assuredly puts the ugly incident caught on tape on New Year’s Eve in 2022 at the top of the list.

Video captured by patrons at a bar in Mexico showed the UFC CEO slapping his wife during a heated argument. White addressed the altercation afterward and stated there were no excuses for his behavior. He added, “You don’t put your hands on a woman ever.”

More than a year later, White reflected on the incident and doubled down on past statements, saying he will have to live with that moment for the rest of his life but his biggest concern back then was always his family and not the way he was perceived publicly for his actions.

“Me and my wife went through a situation last year that we both had to face, and the only thing that mattered to us was our kids,” White told former ESPN anchor Sage Steele on her podcast. “I’m going to be judged for the rest of my life for that and I should be. It happened. I did it.

“When something like that happens, you’ve got to get up the next day and look at yourself in the mirror and say, first, how did that happen? How do I make sure that never happens again? When I say judged, there was a lot of people who are like, ‘If it happened there, that isn’t the first rodeo, that’s happened before.’ I would say the same exact thing. I would say the same thing. But at the end of the day, here’s the truth … your kids know exactly who you are.”

White has three children — two boys and a girl — and they were his central focus in the fallout from the altercation.

As much as he took responsibility for his actions and understands that incident will haunt him for the rest of his days, White says he didn’t really care what anybody else thought about him. He just had to reconcile those actions with his children.

“If you’re a racist, your kids know you’re a racist,” White explained. “If you do things like that to your wife, your kids know. The list goes on and on, nobody knows you better than your kids do. They lived it. They live in the house for 18 to 20 years and they see what they see. My kids know who I am. My kids know what I’m about. That’s the only f****** thing that matters to me. When that situation happened, we had to deal with our kids. F****** media, you think I give a s*** what they f****** think? They can all kiss my ass. My kids were the focus and the priority during that situation. Dana, my oldest, didn’t talk to us for like four days. We got through it with them, but at the end of the day, your kids know who you are.

“That was the most important part of it. That was the only thing that mattered to me and my wife. Nobody wants to see their dumb, drunk parents slapping each other on TMZ, you know what I mean? It is what it is. It was bad, but it happened and it needed to be dealt with. When I was going out and talking about it publicly and you’ve got the media asking you about apologies, we apologized. We apologized to the people that we needed to apologize to — to our kids. That’s what we did.”

White says he doesn’t shy away from addressing his actions because he can’t expect that he’ll ever live down that moment, no matter what else happens for the rest of his life.

As much as he bemoans cancel culture and backlash celebrities face for social or political views, White fully understands and accepts the criticism he took for his actions.

“When I had to talk about that stuff publicly and I’m comfortable talking about it publicly, it’s a part of my life and it’s something that happened and it’s something that I had to deal with at home,” White said. “The rest of the world, they’re always going to say what they’re going to say about it, but at the end of the day, it’s your kids.

“You’re going to get attacked, but deservedly so for me when that happened. I’m one of these people that every day, when I wake up — and I told you how much I love waking up — I want to be better tomorrow than I am today. When that’s your mentality and you wake up after a night like that, you have to have a serious sit down with yourself and say how did that happen and how do I make sure that never happens again? I handled it.”

In the aftermath of White’s actions, the UFC CEO admits he had to not only reflect on his behavior, but he had to ensure something like that will never happen again. Beyond making things right with his children, White says that was the only other thing that mattered moving forward.

“I made some decisions in my life that I could guarantee that would never happen again,” White said. “I made some decisions in my life and things I needed to fix with myself to make sure that never happens again. That will never happen again, no matter what. Me and my wife have known each other since eighth grade, we’ve been friends since eighth grade and we’ve been married for almost 30 years. It’s weird and I think about it all the time, that that situation would play out on New Year’s Eve, basically on stage, in front of however many people all with phones aimed right at me, and boom, here we are.

“It was crystal clear how and why it happened. I had to take a look at myself and say we need to fix this and this can never happen again.”

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Ronda Rousey became one of the WWE’s most talked-about stars during her time with the company, but it may have been a case of too much, too soon.

When Rousey made her WWE in-ring debut at WrestleMania 34 in April 2018, she wowed fans and critics alike with an entertaining performance in a match that featured sports entertainment legends Kurt Angle and Triple H, as well as WWE executive and longtime on-screen character Stephanie McMahon. Rousey teamed up with Angle against the power couple of Triple H and McMahon, going on to win the storyline contest when Rousey submitted McMahon with an armbar, the same move that she was her specialty during a wildly successful UFC run.

Rousey went on to become a prominent member of the WWE roster before exiting the company in 2023, and she recently spoke publicly about the problems she experienced with several WWE executives.

Current WWE Superstar Becky Lynch was asked about Rousey’s comments on The MMA Hour, and she first responded by offering her own account of the ups and downs of working for the entertainment giant.

“I have a very different view and a very different experience of WWE,” Lynch said. “I always wanted to do this. This is what I always wanted to do. I love this. I love this, and is it perfect? No, nothing is. Nothing is. I’ve worked in little delis that you’re like, ‘How does this place operate?’ The size of WWE and the amount of talent and people that go into making it go live on TV for five hours a week when you’re just talking about Raw and Smackdown, and then you’ve got pay-per-views and then you’ve got NXT — so there’s so many people that go behind that, so you’re going to be dealing with a lot of people, so you’re going to be having some negative experiences. But this is my dream. I’ve always wanted it to be good, I’ve always looked at myself, how can I be better? How can I make the division better? And I’ve always worked to make it better.

“Stuff like the creative, no, it’s not always great. There’s been a history of it not making sense to me, but nobody’s personally going, ‘How do we make Becky Lynch look awful?’ But they have so much going on, there is so much going on and the fact that we pull everything off the way that we do, and even at a time when notoriously the shows were getting rewritten as we were going live on TV, and we still go them done and we still went out there, we still hit our times and we still made the show work — and no, it was not always great, but a lot of it was all doing the best we can. Nobody wants to go out there and do bad work or make anybody look bad.”

Regarding Rousey specifically, Lynch suggested that the fame Rousey achieved in the UFC might have prompted the WWE decision-makers to push her too quickly. Rousey was the first UFC women’s bantamweight champion and competed in a number of high-profile contests that drew millions of pay-per-view buys, with her time at the top coming to an abrupt end following back-to-back knockout losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes.

Lynch and Rousey worked together on several occasions (notably, alongside wrestler Charlotte Flair, Lynch and Rousey competed in the main event of WrestleMania 35, the first time women headlined the WWE’s marquee event), and while Rousey held her own with many of the company’s more experienced performers, Lynch thinks that Rousey’s quick start might have hurt her in the long run.

“She was coming off a different industry,” Lynch said. “She was a star and she should have been handled differently in terms of — I think she had such a great first outing that everybody thought, ‘Oh, she can wrestle.’ I mean this with respect, but she couldn’t wrestle.

“What we do isn’t something that you can just have one good match and then, ‘OK, yeah, I’m off to the races.’ It’s a craft, and you have to learn your craft, and you have to be diligent about learning your craft. But everybody treated Ronda like she already knew it because when she first came in, she was good in that first bout, but she was also working with Kurt Angle, she was working with Triple H, Stephanie McMahon. It was a well-rehearsed match because everybody wanted her to succeed. And then it was, ‘OK, she can do this, off to the races,’ and that was mishandling her because she was a star in her own right and she’d done so much for MMA.

“So in terms of that and booking, that wasn’t done well, but my experience coming from nobody thinking that I was going to be worth anything and making myself very valuable to the company and very valuable to wrestling in general, it’s because I loved it. Because I loved it and I sought out to do it. She came in and I think she found a place that she enjoyed, she liked, but she never sought to do it from a young age, and I think that changes the experience you have when you go into a place.”

Lynch, who is in the midst of a media tour to promote her autobiography Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl, was also asked to comment on the recent sex trafficking allegations levied at former WWE boss Vince McMahon. She spoke highly of her working relationship with McMahon and his contributions to the wrestling business, but called the allegations “horrible,” and said that while she didn’t experience mistreatment, “I hate that anybody experienced it.”

As for Rousey specifically mentioning WWE executives John Laurinaitis and Bruce Prichard in her complaints, Lynch declined to speak on that matter, as Rousey has not said specifically how the two crossed her. More details about Rousey’s time in the WWE are expected to be revealed in her own upcoming memoir, Our Fight.

“I’ve not read the book, so anything that I’m hearing, it’s hearing it out of context, so you don’t know what’s a headline grab and what gets more contextualized if you read the book,” Lynch said.

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MMA: Mixed Martial Arts

Dana White wins more than he loses, but there’s one big money setback in Las Vegas that he’ll never forget.

During an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast, White was asked to recall the biggest gambling loss that he’d ever suffered and the UFC CEO instantly recalled an evening where too many drinks led to a seven-figure hit to his bank account.

“I would call this the biggest loss for many different reasons,” White said. “You live and you learn in life, you figure things out as you go along. One night I’m over at the Rio and they’ve got big suites over there, so I go over there with some buddies and we got one of the suites and we have some dinner and we start drinking. So we’re having some drinks, dinner, and blah blah blah. It starts to ramp up, I’m having a good time and I make my way down to the high limit room and we start gambling. I continue to drink, having a blast, I end up leaving to go home that night and I lost, like, 80 grand.

“So I wake up the next morning, I’m like, ‘F***. Those m*********** got me for 80,000 last night.’ So I’m at work the next day and the host over there calls me and he says, ‘Hey Dana, are you coming back? Do you still need the room that you guys had where you ate and all that s***?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t need the room, but don’t get too comfortable with my f****** 80 grand, I’m coming back for it.’ Dead f****** silence on the other end of the phone.

“And he’s like, ‘Dana. You lost $ 3 million last night.”

White, ever the combatant whether in business or in his personal life, questioned the $ 3 million figure especially since he knew there were limits set on how much of his riches he could drop at that particular casino.

Unfortunately for White, his famously forceful personality worked against him this time.

“‘What the f*** are you talking about?’” White said. “‘I only have a million-and-a-half dollar credit line.’

“He goes, ‘Yeah, you made us call the GM of the hotel and you started calling him ‘a f****** p****’ and I went, ‘Yeah, no, that sounds like something I would do.”

So White had to eat the loss, a drop in the water for the wildly successful combat sports executive who has had plenty of wins in Las Vegas as well. Still, the mistake stung and it’s one that White learned a valuable lesson from.

“You know, there’s been a lot of cases where people are in Vegas and they’re like, ‘I lost all this money. They were giving me free drinks and I drank too much and I was taken advantage of,’” White said. “No, you stupid m***********, man up, you got f****** drunk. Alcohol is free, but you don’t have to f****** drink it.

“This was a huge learning lesson for me, so I never drank again when I was playing cards after that night.”

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