Fast Company, a monthly magazine that examines what’s hot and what’s next in tech innovations and entrepreneurship, focused on everyone’s favorite mixed martial arts organization in a November feature that details their past, present and what the UFC expects to be a prosperous future.
Writer Luke O’Brien interviewed the usual suspects in Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta, rehashing most of the same stories that anyone remotely interested in UFC business has heard 100 times. Using UFC 148 as a backdrop, O’Brien takes the readers inside the company’s planned expansion, their deal with Fox, the issues between White and Jon Jones, the possibility of unionization and more.
It’s a well-done balanced article that, again, will be familiar ground to most people that visit this site. However, there is a fun tidbit about the variance in office decor between White and Fertitta — a nod to their very different public personas.
A visitor to White’s office in the headquarters of Zuffa, the UFC’s parent company, will encounter a yakuza member having sex with a young woman. The giant Nobuyoshi Araki print hangs on a wall next to a giant print of Mike Tyson’s bull neck, which isn’t far from a giant print of a gorilla holding a gun. A partial list of the room’s other contents: a painting that blares “Pay attention, motherfuckers!”; copies of the Old and New Testaments carved into the shape of pistols; a $380,000 print of a naked Stephanie Seymour hanging over the toilet. The showpiece, however, is against the back wall inside a glass case. “Check this out,” White says, hovering reverently over the case. “I bought it from a museum in Dallas.” It is a fossilized sabertooth tiger skull. It cost $160,000.
By contrast, Lorenzo Fertitta, the UFC CEO and White’s best friend, has a Basquiat hanging in his adjacent office. He won’t talk about the painting unless prompted. Fertitta and White met in high school. As different as they are, they complement each other nicely: White’s streetwise yin to the pensive yang of Fertitta, a New York University business-school grad who focuses on strategy.
The article is available for free on Fast Company’s website.
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