UFC CEO and President Dana White was recently asked his opinions on Jiu-Jitsu and somewhat unsurprisingly, he has a clear preference for no gi over the gi. Although White has never had any competitive career in combat sports to speak of, he has trained in various martial arts prior to becoming one of the biggest figures in the MMA world. His involvement with combat sports originally began when he took up boxing, although he quickly gave up on any idea of becoming a professional in the sport and started to run boxercise gyms instead.
Dana White even started training in Jiu-Jitsu himself at one point in time, prior to becoming the manager for MMA legends Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. This was before the Fertitta brothers bought the UFC and installed him as the promotion’s president, a move that changed the face of professional MMA forever. Since then White has become synonymous with the UFC and MMA itself, so his involvement with Jiu-Jitsu has come from that angle rather than as a practitioner or competitor. The majority of his exposure to the sport, especially in recent years, has been in the form of watching no gi grappling under MMA rules.
With the rise in popularity of Jiu-Jitsu, the promotion’s streaming service UFC Fight Pass started to sign broadcasting deals with several major professional grappling promotions all around the world. They already held the rights to stream some of the best competitors on the planet through Polaris, Quintet, and EBI, but the promotion took another step forward in recent years. Dana White actually decided to bring the UFC into the Jiu-Jitsu world on their own terms, with the creation of the wildly successful UFC Fight Pass Invitational.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise then that White has a preference for no gi competition above the gi, as the grappling promotion that he is involved with exclusively focuses on no gi. The debate between whether gi or no gi Jiu-Jitsu is better has raged on for decades at this point and it’s showing no signs of slowing down at all, but the answer seems simple for White:
“In my opinion, and all the Jiu-Jitsu f***ing people are going to go crazy over this, but in my opinion no gi is way better than gi.”
BJJ World uploaded the clip from the interview where Dana White reveals whether he prefers gi or no gi Jiu-Jitsu in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
