Behind the Meteoric Rise of a Brutal Sport: Dana White

If you're not a follower of mixed martial arts, know this about the sport: It's bigger than you think. "Depending on whom you ask, MMA is the third-largest sport in the world, behind only basketball and soccer, with anywhere from 300 million to 600 million fans worldwide," writes Jack Crosbie at Rolling Stone. His deep dive into the subject isn't exactly about the sport itself, one in which two fighters square off in a violent fight with few rules—eye-gouging is a no-no, but fighters can not only punch, but knee, kick, and elbow their opponent. Instead, it's about how one man, Dana White, has largely made MMA the behemoth it is today through his Ultimate Fighting Championship. The story recounts how White, a boxing-fitness coach in the late 1990s, began managing a few fighters in the fledgling sport.

In 2001, when he realized the young UFC was about to go bankrupt, he informed his casino-magnate friends the Fertitta brothers, who bought it for $2 million and made White president and CEO. It's been on a steady rise since. "White's more than 25-year devotion to the sport and making money from it has made him its principal god, his authority largely unchecked by investors and fighters alike," writes Crosbie. He draws a parallel to the rise of the UFC and the rise of Donald Trump's political movement. "It should come as little surprise, then, that White and Trump are close friends, their lives intertwined for decades by politics and business, their outlooks on the world united by a fixation on loyalty and a ruthless intolerance of opposition."

Longtime White friend Joe Rogan enters the mix as well as an early proponent of the sport. "I'm like the middleman in this relationship," White tells Crosbie. "I'm very close to Rogan and loyal to Rogan, and Rogan is very close and loyal to me; and then I'm very close to Trump and very loyal to Trump, and Trump is loyal to me. And we're all connected by this UFC thing." Read the full profile, which questions UFC's relatively small revenue-sharing system with the fighters of whom it "asks everything." (Or check out other longform recaps.)