Dana White gets brutally honest about giving up on his dream of becoming a "world champion"

As it turns out, Dana White once dreamed of becoming a world champion fighter himself. However, the legendary MMA promoter who turned the UFC into a global phenomenon ultimately gave up on the dream following a sobering realization.

On a recent episode of the Pound 4 Pound podcast, the 56-year-old reminisced about his abandoned dream and why he ended the pursuit. Speaking to Henry Cejudo and Kamaru Usman, White said:

"I say it all the time. I've said it publicly, and I've said it here. At one point in my life, I believed that I wanted to be a f**king professional fighter and a world champion, and someday you've got to wake up and realize and you look in the mirror and you're like, 'Yeah, you ain't it. You don't have it.'"

As White sees it, few people on the planet have been gifted the mental and physical prowess to fight for a living:

Get the latest updates on One Championship Rankings at Sportskeeda and more

"I've had the incredible experience over the years to interact with so many different levels of fighters, from guys just starting out to people who I believe are the best, Olympic f**king world champions and all that s**t, and you guys are different and there are no other people on Earth like it, and you can be a world championship football player, a world championship basketball player, it's not the same... It's about who you are [mentally] and how you are built."

Check out Dana White's remarks about fighters below:

---

When Dana White said he would've beaten Tito Ortiz

While Dana White managed Tito Ortiz at one point, the pair nearly faced off in a boxing match in 2007. However, the fight ultimately fell through as Ortiz failed to show up for the weigh-ins.

During a 2018 interview with TMZ Sports, White proclaimed that he would've defeated the former UFC light heavyweight champion if the fight had come to fruition:

"I trained for it, I brought in guys. I spent serious time, really training for this fight, and I was absolutely going to do it... He blinked. Yeah, I would've won. I absolutely would've won that boxing match."

Ortiz, known primarily for his wrestling during his MMA heyday, doesn't have the best track record as a striker. In his lone pro boxing fight in 2021, 'The Huntington Beach Bad Boy' suffered a first-round KO loss to fellow UFC legend Anderson Silva.

White, meanwhile, used to be a boxercise trainer in the Boston area in the early 1990s. Boxercise is a high-intensity interval training method that is a sub-genre of boxing without sparring and competitive aspects.

Edited by Ujwal Jain