This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Malignaggi, who for years has called MMA the dumbest sport, MMA fans the dumbest combat sports fan, and Dana White. a big fat Pillsbury Doughboy.
Malignaggi appeared on the mixed martial arts radar in 2016 when Conor McGregor knocked him around McGregor vs Mayweather in sparring before the fight. He called the situation a setup and publicity stunt and has not forgiven anyone in the sport since. So he wondered if Netflix’s upcoming documentary about Dana White was anything but another faux-glaze effort.
“Tell me all about Dana White?” asked Malignaggi on the Ariel Helwan show. “You know, Netflix has been putting out some pretty good bulls–documentaries about artists, but this might be the best bull–the artist one of them all. Hey, bro. Is there anything real about Dana White?”
“Let me put a few things in there that I’ve heard from the East Coast, okay?” he continued. “He was a Tae Bo instructor, so hopefully they’ll go back to his Tae Bo career before he joined Fertitta and got into the UFC. Guaranteed butt he had with a couple of rich friends that got him in.”
“And then, after I was Tae Bo’s mentor, I heard that he got kicked out of Boston because he owed some people money or wronged some people, some street people, and he got kicked out of Boston and that’s how he ended up in Vegas.”
“They’re going to tell everything, I hope they go into these things at least a little bit,” Malignaggi said. “Because I’m as curious as anybody. But somehow I got the feeling that they probably weren’t going to delve into these things. So we shouldn’t call it comprehensive. It’s bulls—the artist’s story and Dana White. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“How fast did he run out of Boston to get to Vegas? Did he fear for his life? How good was his career coaching Tae Bo? You know? I heard he was deep into that Tae Bo thing. He might be the next Billy Blanks on the way, and the Fertittas changed history by taking him to Vegas and putting him in charge of the UFC.”
“I personally am curious and would like to know such things,” concluded Malignaggi. “Like the truth, not bulls—the stuff we’ll probably cover in a documentary. But that’s just me.”
White has regularly talked about how he ran a gym in Boston and was chased out of town by associates of gangster Whitey Bulger, who began demanding a $3,000 payment to keep the business going. What’s less discussed is how deeply White took training in Tae Bo classes. An old photo of White wearing a sweatband and running to some sort of boxing class is all we have to go on there, and White says it was part legitimate classes for business professionals.
White he has skeletons in his closet which are generally not brought up, and you can fill a rolodex with names people ready to share stories of the UFC president trying to destroy them for such great causes and petty. Will Netflix’s message really delve into Dana’s darker side? Or is it another White carry takes Vegas casinos for everything they have until they ban him from playing? We’ll have to wait and find out.
