Even though Dana White is the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, he has gotten into his fair share of confrontations with the talent. While most of them remained verbal scuffles and were looked back and laughed upon years down the line, one feud nearly came to a pay-per-view boxing match: The feud with Tito Ortiz.
The two have a storied history together and while most of it is negative, there was a time when the two were more friends than business partners. White shared the time he got into a full blown fist fight on an airplane with Ortiz in a recent edition of “Conan”:
“We were gonna fight one time in a boxing match but I actually never told this story publicly before but we were on a private plane on our way to Japan and it was my partners the Fertitta brothers, myself, Tito Ortiz and our matchmaker at the time, Joe Silva. Tito and I were messing around and he put me in what’s called a neck crank. I was tapping and he didn’t stop. You can seriously hurt somebody in a neck crank, especially as big and strong as Tito is.”
“So I just started blasting him in the ribs, started punching him in the ribs and when he let go… just jumped up and it was just a full blown fist fight in the plane.”
