Is Dana White like Don King?

A couple of years ago, Tito Ortiz compared Dana White to Don King on the Howard Stern show. Ortiz may have just been speaking out of frustration, but he raised an interesting question: how similar are King and White? Both were born east of the Mississippi and have managed champion level fighters, both have hosted sporting events across the world and both can be considered entrepreneurs and game changers among their generation. The difference between them lies in the way their morals affect their respective sport.

I personally don’t know either man, however, the saying, “actions speak louder than words” applies here. Let’s start with the recent Shine III letdown. Sure, King had a right to pull his Don King Productions (DKP) contracted fighter from the event, but the problem was how he did it. Although King knew when and where the event was going to take place weeks in advance, he had made up his mind to stop it. Not the fight, the ENTIRE card. He did this by filing an injunction to the judge right before the event, so that Shine couldn’t block it before the event started, making 100% sure the fights would not happen. Nothing was done illegally, but what did this decision lead to? It caused Shine to lose money, waste all of the scheduled fighters’ time and money, let down an entire base of MMA and Boxing fans, and made other collaborations with DKP boxers as toxic as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. How many MMA events has Dana White shut down? At the last minute?

Another good moral comparison between the two is how both men would approach Kimbo Slice. Kimbo is still a legend on youtube, and any organization that picks him up is sure to have a headliner. When Kimbo seemed unstoppable online, White still had his reservations about him and made these doubts very public, claiming that Kimbo was a “freak show fighter,” that didn’t have the skills to compete at the UFC level. He wasn’t being a dick about it, he was just saying what he saw. White gave him a chance in TUF. Kimbo proved that he was not ready then, and still not ready now by losing badly in 113 to Matt Mitrione. Where White let Kimbo go after 113, in the same situation based on historical facts, King might have proposed a title shot. It may have gone something like this:

“Kimbo baby, I can see that you are a fighter of the people, for the people and by the people, that’s why I’m gonna get you a DIRECT title shot at Brock Lesnar for the heavyweight championship of the world!! Don’t worry about your knee Kimbo baby, because if you cast your bread upon water and have faith, you’ll get back cash. If you don’t have faith, you’ll get back soggy bread, know what I mean baby?”…Yea, it means you don’t give a fuck about anybody but yourself.

Judging a man by his morals isn’t so hard to do, it’s almost a gut instinct of what feels right versus what feels wrong. Since I feel that Don King only represents himself, and not the boxing or MMA world, I will no longer support anything DKP represents. He has ruined boxing. Don’t come and ruin our sport.

~ Ghetto