Best of SI: Dana White Will Restart Sports by Hosting UFC Events on 'Fight Island'

Dana White is the president of the UFC, the mixed martial arts juggernaut slated to make its controversial return this Saturday at the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville. In the lead-up to UFC 249, White, 50, spoke with SI about the challenges of staging events in the middle of a global pandemic, his calls (alongside the heads of other sports leagues) with President Donald Trump and his soon-to-open, apocalyptic-sounding retreat.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED: You’re hosting three cards in eight days, starting Saturday. What was it like trying to put on an event? And what made you comfortable doing this while some states are still under stay-at-home orders?

DANA WHITE: While everybody was f------ lying out by the pool, hanging out and doing whatever the f--- they're doing in quarantine, we were in here f------ grinding, man. Fighting crazy wars every day to put on this first event. We pulled it off. We were gonna be able to hold this thing earlier, and they asked us to stand down. … Now we're going Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday. And I don't think I've told anybody this yet: We're gonna come back to Vegas and put on a fight May 23.

Four cards between May 9 and May 23? Could that really be safe?

DW: Then we'll be on our regular schedule again and we’ll open up Fight Island, start doing international fights. Any fight that would've been in, like, Brazil or Canada will be on Fight Island. … Listen, for a lot of these sports organizations, it’s: We need to go overboard on safety now. We go overboard on safety every weekend. 

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