5 things that could happen if Vince McMahon and Dana White switched places
Dana White and Vince McMahon are without doubt two of the most successful promoters of all time.
Both men took their respective companies – UFC and WWE – and helped them to become pay-per-view juggernauts, while fighting off competition from rivals at the same time, Vince famously fending off WCW and Eric Bischoff, while Dana at one stage had a mock tombstone made up with the names of all the competitors he’d managed to bury (or sometimes, they buried themselves, but I digress...).
Some of the tactics they use are similar – a goal to have no wrestler or fighter become bigger than the company, a willingness to forget about grudges if there’s the possibility of making money – but naturally with one working inside MMA and the other in pro-wrestling, there’s a tonne of differences too.
So what would happen if they switched roles?
Uncle Dana suddenly heading up WWE while Vinny Mac ran the UFC?
You can bet your life that there’d be some changes, some good, some bad. Here are five I could imagine happening in this odd, but definitely intriguing scenario.
#1 No more USADA testing in the UFC
Okay, so everyone knows that after the deaths of Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit, WWE introduced a ‘Wellness Policy’ supposedly designed to crack down on the abuse of PEDs, painkillers, and recreational drugs amongst the talent.
But does anyone really buy into it as being legit? I certainly don’t.
Sure, when the policy first kicked in we saw the likes of Chris Masters suddenly shrink in muscle mass, and admittedly, the overall size of top-level WWE talent these days is either much smaller or less chiselled than before, but this is still a company that features the likes of John Cena, HHH, and even newer stars like Neville and Apollo Crews sporting insane physiques that would turn heads in any other drug-tested sport.
UFC, meanwhile, has suffered from a PED issue of its own and after legendary former champion Anderson Silva popped for a myriad of steroids in January 2015, the company decided to bring in USADA to really amp up their drug testing programme.
The result has been pretty dramatic, with a number of notable fighters – Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar amongst them – being caught out for PED usage, and we’ve also seen a lot of physique changes too.
Would Vince McMahon really want an end to the era of the superhuman physique in the UFC? I don’t think so myself. We’ve all seen countless times in the past how he values muscles over anything else.
Maybe he’d want to maintain the illusion of a drug-tested sport, but I think he’d let USADA testing go by-the-by and go back to the old Zuffa tagline of ‘our fighters are tested by the government’ – as in the state athletic commissions.
After all, superhuman physiques draw more fans in, right?