TUF International Headed to Brazil Soon, but Just One of Many UFC Ventures

For UFC president Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship is a labor of love, and one that pays handsomely, but make no bones about it, there is labor involved.

“I don’t ever sleep man,” White told MMAWeekly.com on Thursday, and he was only half-kidding. “Christmas, birthdays, the phone is never off.”

Even with a cast of 250-plus employees, White and his partner in crime, company CEO and co-owner, Lorenzo Fertitta have their hands in everything the company does.

White recently made a trip to Brazil to promote UFC 134: Rio, which is scheduled for Aug. 27 in Rio de Janeiro, and he put some work in on bringing “The Ultimate Fighter” to Brazil while there.

“If (Brazil) is not the first place, it will probably be the second (to get an international flavored Ultimate Fighter). We’ve got three or four places already dialed in for it,” he stated.

But those are just some of the things going on in Brazil, and Brazil is just a drop in the bucket of the UFC’s plans for global domination.

“We’re so big and reaching out so far, it’s just keeping all this together is crazy. We’re working on so many things and trying to get all these deals done,” White declared.

“If you look at it right now, our television deal is up. We just went through all the pay-per-view deals. We’re expanding into all these other countries. Plus, we still run the regular business that we always ran. We’re trying to cut all of these deals now in all of these other countries for ‘The Ultimate Fighter,’ plus television deals. It’s crazy.”

All these deals, of course, take time, and that’s not to mention all of the day-to-day upkeep the company takes whether any of these new ventures ever take place or not.

“We have guys that are running all these different areas for us. I mean, just to negotiate one fight deal with a fighter is… you take one major guy; it takes weeks, sometimes months. And then you start talking about all these other deals we’ve been working on that sometimes take years. There’s one deal we’ve been working on for over two years.”

It does sound crazy, but if you bump into White, just ask him what he’d rather be doing…