The Patriot Post® · Et Tu, UFC?

Dana White is a smart dude, and heretofore he’s been a great businessman. So why on earth would he risk his UFC® brand by throwing in with Bud Freaking Light?

From its humble, hardscrabble beginnings in 1993 as a professional mixed martial arts organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization has, as its website points out, “revolutionized the fight business and today stands as a premium global sports brand, media content company, and the largest Pay-Per-View event provider in the world.”

Just how flush is UFC? The organization reportedly makes more than $1 billion a year. But that’s chump change, a sucker’s share, a rusty pug’s purse. Earlier this year, a single publicly traded company, TKO Group Holdings, was formed to house both UFC and Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, and the total value of that entertainment colossus is $24.1 billion, with UFC accounting for just over half of it.

And yet. As CNBC reports: “Bud Light will again become the official beer sponsor for the Ultimate Fighting Championship with a six-year marketing partnership, the companies announced Tuesday. The sponsorship deal is ‘well into the nine figures,’ and the largest in the mixed martial arts promotion’s history.”

Why, Dana? Why?

“Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light were UFC’s original beer sponsors more than 15 years ago,” said White on Tuesday. “I’m proud to announce we are back in business together.”

If White were in better touch with his UFC customers, and if A-B were that eager to ink a deal, he’d have added a condition to the pending partnership: He’d have demanded that Bud Light first make amends, that the company first issue an apology to its customers.

Fat chance of that. As part of the deal, which goes into effect on January 1, Bud Light gets “exclusive and prominent branding at UFC fights and events, as well as in-arena promotion. In addition, the brewer will collaborate on original content for UFC’s digital and social channels.”

In other words, UFC fans are gonna be seeing Bud Light everywhere. And if you’re like us, everywhere you see a Bud Light banner, you’re going to see Dylan Mulvaney subliminally. We can’t help it. We can’t unsee her him.

What was White’s reason for giving a big middle finger to his loyal fan base? “There are many reasons why I chose to go with Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light,” he said, “most importantly because I feel we are very aligned when it comes to our core values and what the UFC brand stands for. I’m looking forward to all of the incredible things we will do in the years ahead.”

Is he now? In fairness to White, that alignment he spoke of is real. Donald Trump Jr. tried to point this out on his “Triggered” podcast back in April, taking some serious flak while noting that Anheuser-Busch, its employees, and its Political Action Committee gave “about 60 percent to Republicans” in the last election cycle — which is a remarkably strong share in today’s climate of rank corporate wokeism. But then in June, just as the Mulvaney fiasco was dying down, they gave a $200,000 kiss to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce.

White, though, had his price. And the price was somewhere north of $100 million over six years, the value of UFC’s Bud Light deal. As he told Sean Hannity earlier this week: “They employ 65,000 Americans. They have thousands of vets that work for them. They spend $700 million a year with U.S. farmers using their crops to make their products.”

All that is true, but there’s a reason why A-B, which was acquired by Belgium-based InBev in 2008, lost $27 billion in market value after partnering with Mulvaney. Why? Because customers saw that grotesque little marketing ploy as a big-time betrayal. And who can blame them? As our Mark Alexander rightly noted, “This is the fault of woke corporate management, not the consumers who embody the free market.”

Ever since then, A-B has been getting a crash course at the School of Hard Knocks. With news of White’s spit-swapping dalliance with Bud Light, some UFC fans seem ready to take to the Octagon. They’re threatening a boycott. As commentator Robbie Starbuck opines:

Lighting that money on fire would have been less embarrassing than what’s about to happen. Fighters are gonna hate this. Fans will hate it. The customers aren’t coming back @budlight. Period. You made your bed with men who think they’re women, now sleep in it. I get that Dana thinks he has to take the easy money but this damages the UFC brand and puts his fighters in bad spots where they WILL speak out against it. Watch. Embarrassment awaits.

In classic White fashion, though, he punched back against his critics, calling them “dummies” and seeming unconcerned that these were also his customers: “I saw some other f***ing a**hole today saying, ‘Oh, it sounds like they wrote him a script on what to say.’ Nobody writes me a script. Nobody tells me what to say. Ever.”

In other words, Shut up, he explained.

It’ll be interesting to see whether UFC fans take his advice or give him the Bud Light treatment.