Throughout his time as the President of the UFC, Dana White has fallen out with a fair few fighters, but there’s one in particular he loved watching get finished.
His disdain for this individual was so strong, the entrepreneur classes watching him get knocked out as his ‘favorite moment’ in the history of the sport.
Dana White adored watching Chuck Liddell knockout Tito Ortiz
While Dana White has had many a verbal exchange with the athletes under his promotional banner, there are very few he was actually willing to fight. But he made an exception for Tito Ortiz.
Back in 2007, he actively claimed he’d love the opportunity to ‘punch’ The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ in the face.
At one stage, the pair were reportedly on the cusp of agreeing to a sanctioned bout. Alas, it never came to fruition, so White had to settle for watching his nemesis lose to Chuck Liddell instead.
At the peak of his powers, Ortiz was a sensational fighter. However, he was no match for a prime ‘Ice Man’, who rendered him unconscious twice, with the first filling the UFC CEO’s heart with joy.
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In an interview with GQ, he said: “When Chuck Liddell knocked Tito Ortiz out, that was my favorite moment in UFC history.”
In fact, White enjoyed watching the formidable athlete’s demise to such an extent, that he actually asked Liddell to give him the gloves and trunks he wore during the bout, so that he could put them in a glass frame and hang them in his house.
Ultimately, in the end, Ortiz got the last laugh, winning the trilogy bout 14 years on from their first encounter.
Regardless, White still isn’t often found singing his praises, unlike Jon Jones, whom he loves to wax lyrical about.
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From his sensational creativity to his devastating elbows, ‘Bones’ has mesmerized White to such an extent that the 55-year-old can’t even fathom a reality where the heavyweight champion isn’t considered the best fighter on the planet.
Currently, thanks to their recent achievements inside the cage, Islam Makhachev and Alex Pereira hold the number one and two places in the pound-for-pound rankings.
However, White believes that list is utterly insane, recently going on a rant about how Jones is the only man who deserves the number one spot.
He went as far as to claim that anyone who disagrees with him ‘knows nothing about fighting’.
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