Remember when Ray Rice hit his wife and the video shocked the world to the point where he lost his career because of it? Nothing even remotely came close to happening to Dana White, and we’re not even talking about any possible punishment. The overall coverage of it has been almost non-existent and it’s quite shocking to see since it was caught on camera.
TMZ obtained the video and published it Monday as it showed White’s wife striking him and then him retaliating by hitting her back as they were supposed to be celebrating the New Year at a nightclub in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Since the video was released, ESPN has been criticized for failing to properly condemn White’s act of domestic violence.
MMA reporter and ex-ESPN employee Ariel Helwani is the biggest voice right now calling out the World Wide Leader in Sports over their lack of coverage and double standard.
“Look at the way it’s been covered,” Helwani said on his podcast The MMA Hour. “Look, go look! And compare that, by the way, to the way other domestic violence situations have been covered by the mainstream, by them (ESPN)! By people that I respect. But this is what they expect from us. This is what they expect from MMA, from cage-fighting, from the UFC, from Dana White. We are not held to the same standard.”
Helwani added that ESPN and other mainstream outlets don’t hold White in the same regard as other executives.
“They talk about all these things, about other owners, about boxing, about promoters, and they always hold the UFC and Dana White to a different standard,” Helwani continued. “Because we’re the fun thing on Saturday night that you do with your friends, that you bet and you gamble, and you eat your pizza and your wings, and you drink your beer, and then you go to the real stuff on Sunday and then Monday and we’re kind of like the vice on the side. So we don’t get the same type of criticism because they don’t actually think that highly of the sport.”
“Look at the coverage,” Helwani continued. “It was all kid gloves…I can guarantee you, if it was any other sports owner, any other executive, he would be raked over the coals. It would be completely different.”
The only thing that helped White in this matter is that the video was dropped on the same day Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field, so it pushed his incident out of the news much faster than it would’ve been had that moment did not happen.
Here we are almost a week later and the country is still loving every update from Hamlin while Dana White has gotten away virtually unscathed.
Basically, White got lucky.
