Former WWE chairman Vince McMahon once blocked the UFC from striking a broadcast deal with NBC.
UFC president Dana White was a guest on McMahon’s daughter’s podcast, “What’s Your Story?”, with Stephanie McMahon. During the show, White discussed his past dealings with the professional wrestling kingpin, including one time when McMahon blew up his potential TV deal with NBC, which would have seen “The Ultimate Fighter” been broadcast on the USA Network.
White explained that, when the deal was nearly finalized, NBC realized that McMahon had a clause in his own deal with the network that he had the right to veto any other combat sports program being broadcast on USA.
“I think that your father had this thing where, he had to create that. It was like, his thing. I just told this story the other day – I don’t remember where we were – so I’m on the one-yard line. We’re about to get a deal done with NBC. One of my big deal points was, the Ultimate Fighter had to be on USA. So we’re literally in New York for days hammering it out with all the executives over there.
“Finally they come back and say ‘Okay, we’ll do it. We’ll put The Ultimate Fighter on USA.’ The next day we come back and we’re about to sign the deal and do all the stuff, and they’re like, ‘We can’t believe this, we didn’t know this, we just found out, Vince McMahon has the right to determine whether another combat sport can come on to USA.’ And I’m like ‘What? How is that even f*cking possible?'”
White and Lorenzo Fertitta then flew out to WWE headquarters in Connecticut to meet with McMahon, hoping to convince him to give NBC the green light to sign the UFC and broadcast “The Ultimate Fighter” on USA Network. Unfortunately, McMahon was firm on not willing to let the UFC broadcast on the network.
“So me and Lorenzo say we’ll fly out to Connecticut, we’ll meet with Vince, and we’ll see if we can get this done. We fly out, we go into the offices, we meet with your father, we sit down. We lay it out to him, tell him the story, he goes ‘Yeah, I don’t want you on the network.’ We’re like, ‘Why?’ He said ‘Eh, I just don’t want it.’ So that blew up the whole NBC deal.”
Today, the UFC and WWE are partnered under one umbrella, merging in 2023 to form the TKO Holdings Company.
