Former UFC matchmaker Joe Silva used to have a favorite Star Trek analogy to describe how the chain of command worked in the world’s largest fight promotion.
“[UFC president] Dana’s [White] Captain Kirk, and we’re Scotty,” Silva told me and fellow UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby in 2013. “Dana’s always asking for crazy, impossible stuff, and we’re going, ‘Captain, we can’t go any faster!’ He’s the one saying, ‘Dammit Scotty, make it happen!’”
Silva’s gone from the company now, retiring shortly after the initial UFC sale in 2016. But White? He’s still Captain Kirk around here. Everyone else at the UFC is still some version of Scotty.
Take Saturday’s UFC 306 event at Sphere, for example. According to White, the idea came to him when he saw a U2 concert at Sphere shortly after the venue opened in 2023. Halfway through the show, White said later, he realized that the band wasn’t the star here — it was the venue. With its 160,000-square-foot LED screen wrapping around the interior, it had the power to give live-event audiences a new kind of immersive experience.
“I was blown away by the technology, and I started thinking about the possibilities of what we could do,” White said later. “I guess I looked at this thing and said, ‘Eventually, somebody is going to come in here and pull off a sporting event. I want to do it, I want to be first.’”
Thus began a personal quest that is either Quixotic or visionary, depending on how things turn out this weekend.
For White, it seemed to become personal, as it so often does with the UFC president. After announcing non-specific plans to bring an eventual UFC event to Sphere, White began framing the event as another opportunity to prove the haters wrong. Soon it was an obsession.
Even though there weren’t many people publicly doubting the UFC, a company that produces live events, could put on a show in Sphere, a venue built to host live events, White remained fixated on the idea.
“I love challenges,” White said last year. “Everybody keeps saying to me, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to put the Octagon in there. I don’t understand how you’re going to do this. I don’t understand how you’re going to do that.’ Remember that I said this to you tonight: I’m going to put on the greatest live combat sports show anybody’s ever seen.”
Executives at the UFC’s parent company haven’t always seemed quite as enthusiastic about the idea. In a call with investors this past spring, TKO Group Holdings president Mark Shapiro said the event would be much more expensive to put on than a usual UFC outing, but promised that it would be “one and done.” The unstated subtext of these remarks seemed to be that White had insisted on the event, and the parent company had agreed — as long as it was just this once.
As the event draws nearer, White’s predictions and promises for it have been dialed back from “greatest live combat sports show anybody’s ever seen” to something more uncertain.
“Does it work? Is it great? Is it awesome? Does it suck? We don’t know,” White said earlier this week. “We won’t know until it’s over, but we’re gonna try it.”
While that’s a long way from the in-your-face certainty of his earlier statements, it’s also not necessarily a bad thing. At this point in its existence, the UFC is a well-oiled machine that sometimes displays the virtues of its faults. White and Co. have been putting on fight shows nearly every weekend for so many years now that they could almost do it in their sleep. The downside of that is a certain predictable sameness to the event production itself. The action in the cage changes, for better and worse. But the look and feel of a UFC event rarely does.
Last year’s “Noche UFC” event to celebrate Mexican independence was an exception to that rule and a pleasant surprise. Doing the event again this year — and taking it up many, many notches by plunging millions of dollars in production costs into this event at Sphere — may be a risk, but the uncertainty also brings some added excitement.
Here, the UFC production team is being asked to get creative and do something different. It’s an added strain on an already overworked team, to hear UFC employees tell it, but it’s also nothing new from MMA’s Captain Kirk.
“That’s my job is to keep pushing everybody that works here,” White told me when I spoke to him last month. “You know how much I hear, ‘This is too much, we can’t, this is overload?’ That’s my job, is to keep pushing.”
The good news is the UFC has a talented and experienced event production team. Those times when White has let it break free of the usual mold in the past, it’s almost always delivered.
Of course, a creative success here wouldn’t necessarily translate to financial success. Despite White’s claims of a sellout, the exorbitantly priced tickets for UFC 306 have moved much slower than is typical for UFC pay-per-view events. It’s not clear whether that’s because fans don’t feel the fight card itself justifies the asking price, or if it’s because people aren’t willing to take White’s word for it that this will be the greatest fight show ever seen. There are plenty of tickets still available (many of them costing several thousands of dollars), and the resale market for those purchased initially by scalpers is reportedly sluggish.
UFC 306 is being priced like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There’s a good chance it will be. Will that be because the UFC production team rises to yet another challenge from a boss who’s so demanding he sometimes borders on delusional? Or will it be because the whole thing is so hideously expensive that the returns don’t justify the investment, and so the UFC never tries anything like it again?
For that answer, we have to wait until Saturday night. But there is some novel excitement wrapped up in the anticipation of waiting for it.
The UFC, a fight promotion that has run more or less the same show on nearly every continent over the last couple decades, has promised us something new. Whether it’s a masterpiece or a disaster or something in between, at least it will be different.
