'Everybody Deserves a Second Chance': Sage Steele Praises UFC's Dana White for Bud Light Sponsorship Deal
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Former ESPN commentator Sage Steele has praised UFC chief Dana White for resuming his sponsorship deal with the heavily boycotted beer brand Bud Light because “everyone deserves a second chance.”
White has taken much criticism for going back to Bud Light as a sponsor despite the vast, economically damaging boycott of the beer for its two-pronged outrage of calling its customers unsophisticated low lives and then hiring a transgender spokesman to hawk the beer that was previously marketed to working-class customers.
The subsequent boycott of the beer brand cost the company billions in market share and profits.
SportsCenter anchor Sage Steele at the espnW Women + Sports Summit held at The Resort at Pelican Hill on October 23, 2019, in Newport Beach, California. (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
White defended his move, saying that Bud Light had greatly supported the military, the police, and America despite its turn toward the woke agenda. White militantly said that fans who don't like it are “dummies” and “assholes.”
Now, in comments to the “OutKick The Morning” podcast, Steele is praising White for going back to Bud Light as a sponsor, even going so far as to call the re-upping of his sponsorship a “brilliant move.”
“I get it, but I said to Dana when we met a couple of weeks ago … I love that he did that because it’s like No. 1, everybody deserves a second chance, in my opinion,” Steele said, according to Fox News. “I really do believe that. And secondly, what a brilliant business move.”
“When a company is down, down and out, losing billions of dollars, guess what, from a strictly business perspective, they’re going to pay up to try and fix their image,” she said. “And UFC has benefited greatly from that. I just think it’s brilliant, and again, he does not care: ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’ve proven I’m a pretty good businessman.’ And look, it was great to see those guys there, too, enjoying it.”
In other comments, White defended his move by noting that Bud Light employs tens of thousands of Americans and that something should be done to save their jobs.
“These guys employ 65,000 Americans, thousands of vets they employ. They spend over $700 million a year with U.S. farmers, you know, buying their crops for their product. And there's many, many other reasons that I did this,” White told Sean Hannity in Oct.
Dylan Mulvaney accepts the Streamy Award for Breakout Creator onstage at The 2023 Streamy Awards held at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel on August 27, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. (Rich Polk/Penske Media via Getty Images)
White also insisted that Bud Light's “core values” are far more akin to those of mainstream America than they are to the hardcore, extreme left.
Still, Bud Light has been a longtime supporter of the radical LGBTQ agenda. Just last year, the company donated $200,000 to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, and that was just one of its donations to the far left. And that donation was amid the heat of the boycott against it for its transgenderism support.
Despite the boycott, the company has not changed its focus on the far-left causes it has always supported, despite Steele and White's claim that they are addressing their image.
It seems more likely that Bud Light wants everyone to forget their support for the anti-American and anti-family left and just move on. And White and Steele seem more than happy to assist Bud Light in that effort.
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