WASHINGTON -- The annual Memorial Day parade ambled down Constitution Avenue as Michael Ward and his family, visiting from Ohio, stopped in front of The Ellipse and peered through black fencing at three large cranes in the distance.
The cranes, holding a steel structure as tall as the White House, blocked part of the Ward family's view of the president's home. "You see that scaffolding there?" Ward asked his son. "That's for Dana White and his big event with the Octagon."
Ward and his family witnessed what so many did as they walked by the most famous house in the United States on May 25 -- a tall, arched "leg" that represents the beginning of a process to construct the 92-foot-high structure known as "the claw" on the South Lawn of the White House.
Built and owned by a Belgian event staging company called Stageco, which has offices in Colorado and Pennsylvania, the 600-ton, 154-foot-wide behemoth looks like the picker end of an arcade crane game, but it's anything but a simple apparatus. Its steel framework is filled with large beam lights -- the lighting grid also has some aluminum components -- and is covered by a 100-by-100 foot canopy over the top.
Its journey to the White House spanned an ocean, multiple forms of transportation and months of planning to pull off what the UFC hopes will be a centerpiece of its Freedom 250 event on June 14.
THE CLAW'S GIVEN name is not "the claw." At Stageco, it is known as "beta tent," and it typically lives in Europe. Stageco devised the structure for the 2017 Lowlands festival, a three-day music and camping festival in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands, headlined by Mumford & Sons and The xx. It is the smaller version of the "alpha tent," used at the same 2017 festival, and has been a yearly Lowlands fixture since.
"Stageco has done quite a few claw structures," Nick Rivas, the operations manager of Stageco U.S., told ESPN. "And by that I mean we do arches or arcs perpendicular to themselves so it looks like a claw."
When Stageco was first contacted by Tait Global, the UFC's third-party planner for the White House event, about the potential of a UFC card at the White House, Rivas thought there was maybe a "15%" chance the event would occur. Then his phone started rapidly lighting up one day last fall. President Donald Trump had announced the June 14 date for the UFC White House event during a speech at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia and Rivas began getting messages saying the plan was going forward. Now Stageco had to make it happen.
UFC CEO DANA WHITE didn't like the first renderings of the UFC White House staging. The structure partially blocked the view of the White House behind the Octagon and looked like most other UFC arena shows. White told his staff he wanted clear sight lines, no matter the angle.
In an ESPN interview, White said he told UFC chief content officer Craig Borsari: "Oh, hell no, we're not doing this lighting grid. The only thing I want to see during this fight is the entire White House, and if it goes the other way, I want to see the [Washington] Monument."
Borsari and Tait began to research possibilities. Borsari explained to ESPN that he needed something high enough "that it's not blocking the White House when we're in our Camera 1 position," wide enough so the legs aren't "going to be in every shot" obstructing the White House view, and strong enough to hold all of the UFC's lighting, public address system and other needs.
"[Tait] came back and said there's really one structure that's going to be able to achieve everything that you're asking for," Borsari recalled.
Beta tent, aka the claw.
Borsari presented the idea to White and others at UFC headquarters. He showed how the Octagon would fit, the White House visibility and where bleachers would be added. White immediately loved it.
"It wasn't like 10 different back-and-forths," White said. "It was one."
A small-scale model of the South Lawn, including the claw, bleachers and trees -- and the White House in the background -- sat in the UFC lobby last month. White said the staging is perhaps the most expensive part of the $60 million budget the UFC has allotted for the event, though he and the UFC declined to disclose the actual cost.
RIVAS VISITED THE South Lawn in February to understand the logistical modifications that would be necessary to stage a UFC fight. He saw the 22-degree north-to-south slope and restrictions on where the structure could be placed. Rivas said it was a tricky process, but he was pleased with the agreed-upon solution to level out the lawn by creating galvanized steel scaffolding separate from the claw structure itself.
Once it was built, Stageco had to get the structure from Europe to the United States. Rivas said the company shipped most of the equipment in 18 containers by boat and flew other pieces from Germany and Belgium. Parts arrived at the end of February. The containers were trucked to an empty lot in Lititz, Pennsylvania, where the staging was reconstructed for an April test run that needed special events application approval from the Warwick County Board of Supervisors.
Rivas said a typical music tour -- Stageco has worked with Bruno Mars, Morgan Wallen and Las Vegas' Electric Daisy Carnival in recent months -- approaches his company with build ideas at least a year in advance. The White House project timeframe was much shorter, leaving Stageco to mold the UFC's requests to an existing structure over other potential customization options. Rivas said the beta tent was heightened 20 feet and widened 50 feet. Due to South Lawn restrictions, 40 tons of weight were added to each leg at the base to steady and balance the weight of the structure.
Stageco had to understand from lighting vendor DX7 the placement of over 800 lighting modules on the legs and canopy. The UFC and Tait discussed the red, white and blue facade that will cover a weather-resistant layer known as cladding. Tait then hired event design company Atomic to carry out its vision for the exterior of the claw.
"On top of the cladding are our design elements that we wanted to be sure fit the feel and look of the event," Borsari said. "And then on top of that, we got very specific on what the lighting would look like as well, which is a big reason for the test build that we had in Pennsylvania."
Borsari visited the initial build site in April. It was the first time he'd seen the claw in person. He said the dry run honed in the weight dispersal differential, a crucial step because the legs cannot be anchored or dug into the South Lawn. It helped Rivas decide to rent 160-ton cranes, instead of the 120-ton cranes Stageco typically uses during installs. It would use two cranes, instead of one, to raise and secure the pieces.
"Every decision, particularly as it comes to what something is going to look and feel like, ran through our production team," Borsari said. "So the claw isn't just the steel structure. It's the steel structure and then it has the cladding and scenic design on top of it."
Stageco then repacked the pieces differently to account for Secret Service inspections in Washington. Fourteen trailers specifically labeled "Leg 1, Leg 2, Leg 3 and Leg 4" drove from Pennsylvania to Washington, passed inspection and waited in guarded holding facilities before being escorted by police and Secret Service to the White House on May 22 to begin the build out.
PRESIDENT TRUMP BROUGHT a small group of people onto the Truman Balcony on May 25 as six workers in fluorescent vests and hard hats installed a light on the claw's second leg. His party didn't stay long before returning inside, the massive UFC White House construction likely visible through the windows of his residence daily.
Moments later, a massive crane began lifting a second leg into the air. Workers rested on wood blocks and watched as three colleagues stood on the base, coaching the man controlling the crane toward the southwest ballast. The claw leg, black and orange wiring at its base, would be locked into the structure, the next step in assembling the claw.
This was the second major piece of work, the first being a layer of matting placed on the South Lawn to protect the grass. Rows of black compartments stood off to the side, each with a specific label, such as "WEST EYEBROW" or "EAST EYEBROW," referring to the arches on the grid at the top of the structure. Other boxes held the red, white and blue decorative cladding for eventual assembly.
By week's end, the four claw pillars stood on the South Lawn, where they will remain until just after the fight. Rivas said disassembly would take seven to 10 days. Once broken down, the structure will be trucked back to Pennsylvania, where it will be repacked in its more efficient, non-Secret Service-inspected style and put in shipping containers for a three-week journey back across the Atlantic Ocean. Once safely in the Netherlands, it will be reassembled for Lorde and Tyler, The Creator to headline Lowlands this August.