UFC president Dana White and former WWE CEO and Chairman Vince McMahon have had an interesting relationship over the years.
Former WWE athletes have fought in the UFC, and former UFC fighters have become stars in the WWE, but White and McMahon were always competitors in the pay-per-view market. They were business rivals and McMahon made that clear to White by sitting the UFC president in the rafters at a WWE event featuring former UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey.
McMahon attended UFC 276 on July 2nd. White joked that he gave McMahon much better seats than McMahon once gave him.
“They reached out to me and said that he wanted to come to the fights. I gave him much better seats than he gave me when I went to see Ronda,” White said during the DWCS Post-fight Press Conference earlier this week.
“Ronda says, ‘You have to be at this event. I want you to be there,’ and all of this. I said, ‘Ronda, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ She was like, ‘alright. I’m going to let them know you’re coming.’ Cool. Cool. I show up. It’s in New Orleans. I fly down to f**king New Orleans. No going in the back, or any of that sh*t. ‘They (the tickets) are at the will call window for you.’ I go to the f**king will call window and, ‘yeah, we don’t have tickets for you,'” White said.
“I call some people. ‘Oh yeah, we found them. Okay. We’ve got your tickets.’ When I tell you I was in the f**king rafters, we were in the f**king rafters. People were coming up to me and saying, ‘Why are you sitting in these seats?’ I said, ‘Well, this is where they sat me, so f**k em. I’m going to sit right here.'”
White appeared on the WWE broadcast that night. The professional wrestling organization showed him on camera, but things weren’t exactly as they seemed.
“The cameraman had to f**king crawl over about 75 people, kick somebody out of his f**king seat three rows ahead of me so he could just get that shot,” White explained. “The let me know what they thought of me at that event.”
“I sat in my f**king seats and I watched the whole event, and then we left.”
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Dana White recounts the time Vince McMahon sat him in the cheap seats