Dana White is the President of the UFC and is certainly a controversial figure in the world of MMA. Dana White was also previously accused of an ‘illegal crime’ in Las Vegas.
While speaking during a recent interview with 10X Health Systems’ Grant Cardone, UFC President Dana White talked about the bizarre story of how a cocaine dealer inadvertently helped in a huge ESPN-UFC broadcast deal.
White revealed that former ESPN President John Skipper didn’t want to sign on the broadcast deal with the premier MMA promotion. However, once Skipper’s cocaine dealer went public with his drug use, he was replaced at ESPN by Jimmy Picaro, who was a massive UFC fan. Here is what Dana White said below:
“John Skipper ran ESPN… hates UFC. Our (UFC’s) FOX deal is up and we were probably not going to end up doing another deal with FOX… John Skipper was never ever going to take the UFC, so we’re in a very tough place. [Then] John Skipper’s cocaine dealer is going to rat him out. So he has to tell Disney, yeah my cocaine dealer is probably going to go public. So he has to step down from ESPN… Who do they put in as the new president? Jimmy Picaro, who ran Yahoo Sports for years and I’ve known him for a long time and he is a great dude and he loves UFC… and we end up doing the ESPN deal when our deal is up.”
