Matt Flegenheimer
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Flegenheimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sabrina Tavernese.
Thank you so much for having me.
Sure. UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. It's the sort of primary promotion associated with mixed martial arts. It is a cage fighting enterprise which combines elements of kickboxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu into this kind of very painful medley of activities in what they call the octagon, this eight-sided cage where two fighters convene and beat each other up over a course of rounds.
It also has been one of the fastest growing sports. Huge audience internationally. Was acquired for $4 billion in 2016. Has only grown since, not just in the sports world, but culturally and politically as well. And really has a kind of crowning moment in November.
So, President-elect Trump, really fresh off his election win, attends a fight at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Trump is sort of waiting in the wings with his entourage and walks out almost as if he is the fighter. President and CEO of the UFC, Dana White is to his left. Elon Musk is with him. Mike Johnson is with him.
various cabinet members to be if he has his way.
And the crowd just loses its mind.
And Trump is taking this all in. This is obviously a very friendly room for him, and he has chosen this as a major post-election victory lap space.
And he got the reception that he wanted. So they're showing this video on the Jumbotron above the octagon, showing various triumphant moments for the president-elect.
And as the video ends, you see the number 45 flash across the screen, and then it moves to 47, showing his presidency and his presidency-to-be.
You know, I think it's actually a pretty natural choice for Trump if you think about the arc of Trump and the UFC across really 20 plus years at this point. And that arc begins with Dana White. White has been a close friend and ally of Trump's and they've kind of risen in parallel and have kind of developed an understanding, not just as people who are in business, who are transactional.
But I think beyond that, there's a sort of visceral understanding mutually about what what it means to succeed in this American moment without having kind of establishment forces behind you every step of the way. I think White understands that about Trump, but I think Trump understands that about White.
So he's from Boston. He sort of bounces around in his youth. He's kind of a serial scofflaw by his own account. He's a hotel bellman for a bit, trains to be a boxer, becomes a boxing trainer, winds up moving to Vegas, continues training and eventually managing fighters
and really becomes sort of enthralled with the ufc and this is the sort of mid to late 1990s it's a moment where the ufc is very much on the fringe it is a young fledgling league with a quite bad reputation across a lot of the american mainstream we're live from the mile high city of denver colorado eight of the deadliest fighters in the world will meet in a no holds barred combat to
And as a viewing experience, the sort of production values were low. The venues were pretty grungy. This was not Saturday night at Madison Square Garden. The UFC's own tagline for a time was, there are no rules. That was sort of the pitch. So really bloody. Bloody and lawless.
John McCain calls it human cockfighting. States are banning it by the dozen. Venues don't want to host fights. But despite all of that, you know, Dane White really sees some potential in the UFC. And he sees a sort of appetite in the American audience and beyond for a level of violence through sports that I think the expectation was prior to that maybe people didn't quite have the stomach for.
Yeah, I think to White, this is an opportunity. So what he does is talks to a couple of high school buddies from a family of casino operators and convinces them to put up $2 million to buy the UFC at this moment when it's certainly not a premium property and to put him in charge and give him a stake and really let him kind of execute the vision that he has for what the sport can become.
They find someone who does want to host the thing, or is at least willing.
Somebody with a long history of hosting fights, at least boxing.
And that is the future president and president-elect, Donald Trump.
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