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[dream]

It was notable ESPN said they couldn’t get any current fighters to speak on camera. White claimed that Matt Serra had told him they came to interview him, didn’t like what he was saying, and shut down the interview. Barr said that one fighter in the company told him in specific that if he was to participate in this piece, his UFC career would be over.
UFC’s return piece interviewed Chuck Liddell, who noted being bonused above his PPV percentage at times, Forrest Griffin, who noted that he went from making $30,000 per year as a police officer to making millions, and Serra noted how the UFC exposure allowed him to build his local businesses which include two 10,000-square foot gyms on Long Island.
Barr noted that no UFC fighters would talk on the record, but several were willing to talk. It’s become accepted when you talk to fighters these days, that unlike athletes in other sports, what they get paid, at least for attribution, is not something many are going to say much about. UFC is not a monopoly, as there are untold number of smaller promotions around the country. One competitor, Bellator, owned by media giant Viacom, that will have a very significant television deal with Spike starting in 2013. But they are the controlling major league and with Zuffa’s purchase of Strikeforce in March, leverage that at least some fighters have had at playing two competitors against each other (which resulted in very good contracts for people like Dan Henderson, Gilbert Melendez and Robbie Lawler among others) for top fighters was gone.
“We fleshed out stories on guys on the low end, who make six and six, ($6,000 guaranteed and a $6,000 winning bonus), eight and eight or ten and ten, the scale for incoming fighters,” said Barr. “Even though they wouldn’t attach their names to it, we heard from enough of them. It’s tough for the guys on the lower end. For journeyman fighters, they have to pay for their own training expenses, all the additional expenses that come with being a fighter full-time. It’s a real struggle. Not only are these guys tough as hell, but they really make some serious sacrifices in pursuit of the sport they love, and that becomes evident.”
“By the time you pay your trainer, one experienced fighter told me a training camp costs him close to 10 grand, some 7-10 grand, and he might fight three times a year, so, low end, that’s $21,000, and that’s before he’s paid his management company,” said Barr.
A couple of UFC fighters claimed in an MMAjunkie.com article that while their base listed pay isn’t necessarily high, that’s not the complete story. George Roop said that in his first fight of 2011, a knockout loss to Mark Hominick on a Spike fight, he was listed as making $6,000. He noted that he also got a $6,000 bonus and cleared $20,000 from sponsors (he would have earned $23,000 in sponsors but $3,000 went to his manager). In his second fight, a win over Josh Grispi, also a television fight, he was listed at making $12,000, and said he got another bonus of either $6,000 or $8,000 and made just under $20,000 from sponsors. In his third fight, with Hatsu Hioki in a prelim fight on PPV, he got $8,000, got paid either $5,000 or $6,000 as a bonus and made $19,000 from sponsors, so he cleared $100,000 for the year before management and costs of training. He also noted he was able to get paid for a few appearances as a celebrity and that due to his UFC exposure he was able to get $70 per hour teaching private lessons.
Jacob Volkmann, who won three fights during the year, earned $84,000 in listed purses, $10,000 in unannounced bonuses and $4,700 from sponsors. Of that $98,700, he said 20% went to his management and he paid $1,000 during the year in gym and training fees, but also noted spending $250 per week in gas to and from training.
On 12/30, the three lowest paid fighters were listed at earning $8,000, although virtually every fighter on a UFC pay-per-view show gets a bonus of some sorts, usually a minimum of $5,000, sometimes considerably more, that the public doesn’t hear about. Of the 22 fighters on the show, at least 14 earned in excess of $25,000.
UFC released the unedited interview between Barr and Fertitta that they filmed themselves, the key point being where Fertitta noted that ESPN made $2.8 billion in EBITDA last year, umpteen times more than Zuffa did, and that there was a boxer on ESPN 2's Friday Night Fights show that earned only $275 (this was not for a fight that aired on television, although UFC pays significantly more for dark matches underneath on Spike televised cards that are unlikely to air on television), far less than Zuffa’s minimum, which the piece stated was $6,000 to show and a $6,000 win bonus. In actuality, the Strikeforce show on 1/7 had four fighters on a $4,000/$4,000 purse, and there have been at least two fighters on PPV’s in recent months getting those same $4,000/$4,000 figures. However, in the piece, narrated by Bob Ley, a clip was shown of an ESPN 2 boxing match and it noted that some boxers only make a few hundred dollars for a fight. It’s not exactly the same thing, given ESPN 2 did not promote the fight and pay the talent and these were far lower on the totem poll shows generating far less income than a UFC event. The promoters rely on very small gates and a comparatively minuscule licensing fee ESPN 2 pays and nobody spoke of the percentage of revenue such a show paid the fighters. But, veterans of the boxing business who are aware of how UFC pays and treats fighters overall concurred they take care of its prelim fighters better than any organization around, and perhaps in history.
White blasted ESPN 2 for not paying more of a licensing fee to boxing so the fighters could earn more than a few hundred, and that they should have investigated themselves to complain about how little undercard fighters earn.
This led to an exchange between White and Dan Rafael, ESPN’s lead boxing writer on twitter.
Rafael wrote to White that ESPN does not pay the fighters, the promoters do, and ESPN pays the promoters a licensing fee. White said that when ESPN is raking in the highest carriage rates of any television station and $2.8 billion a year (an estimate of ESPN’s profits before taxes this year) then they should pay more. Rafael then said his point was that Fertitta was mixing apples and oranges. White then said, “No he isn’t. These guys on ESPN want to say we don’t pay fair and boxing pays more? Who has more money than ESPN? We pay more.”
In reality, UFC does pay more for lower card fighters, as a general rule, but in terms of total pay, Pacquiao and Mayweather by themselves may earn nearly as much as the entire UFC roster combined. Although that also could be wrong given there are no figures released to back that up and exactly what was the total number UFC paid fighters in 2011 is at best a shot in the dark.
Rafael noted ESPN spends very limited money on boxing programming, it’s one of 1,000 sports it shows and spends billions on the NFL, MLB, NBA and NCAA and that if ESPN was paying a licensing fee of millions for a boxing show than it would be reasonable to compare. White then said that’s like Nike saying a factory in China makes the shoes, not us. “How can we be responsible? ESPN, 2 faced liars.”
“How can they say they are not responsible for what ESPN Friday Night Fights guys get paid? When we pay ten times more.
and they are trying to blast us on what we pay guys!? Lol, it’s a joke. Blew up in their face big time.”
Rafael said, “I am not defending any particular story, I am saying Lorenzo’s argument was flawed, that’s all.”
Rafael then wrote, “Blaming ESPN for the purses a promoter pays on an ESPN show is like blaming Fox (or previously Spike or Versus) for UFC purses.”
“You can’t compare ESPN to UFC,” he wrote. “One is a television network. One is a promotional entity. ESPN akin to Fox. UFC akin to Top Rank.”
White then wrote, “We financed the UFC for 6 years and paid all the fighters out of our pockets. And yes, why doesn’t ESPN pay them more/lic fee.”
But when you figure the bottom pay for a UFC fighter, as a general rule, it’s better than the bottom pay for boxers on televised and even opening match guys on major PPV shows, plus UFC is the first sustaining fight company in the U.S. to give fighters insurance (IFL did as well but they didn’t sustain), which is a big deal.
But even a fairly well known mid-level fighter who is popular, but not a draw, such as Krzysztof Soszynski talked about retirement noting the difficulty he had in supporting his family on his UFC pay. A median UFC fighter will earn $30,000 to $85,000 per year, depending on whether they win their fights, and if they aren’t hurt and can get three fights in during a year. Fertitta himself said the average fighter actually winds up fighting 1.6 times per year. That’s why for most fighters, the performance bonuses that range from $40,000 on smaller shows and usually $65,000 to, for the biggest shows, North of six figures, are such a big deal to the average fighters. That is why some guys make agreements to go all out for the best fight bonuses even if they don’t necessarily implement parts of their games in the process.
That can be augmented by sponsor money, but sponsor money has dried up greatly in recent years both due to the weakening economy and UFC changing the rules where sponsors first have to pay UFC a fee, which can be anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000 per year, before they can even have the right to sponsor fighters. This takes all the local small-time sponsors who may be willing to pay $5,000 or $10,000 to sponsor a local fighter out of the picture, and with that so-called sponsor tax, eliminates a sizeable amount of the sponsor’s budget actually going to fighters. UFC argues, correctly, that virtually no other sport would allow advertising on its TV shows and PPV shows without the league getting a cut. There is also the argument they cut out a large percentage of sponsors who stiff fighters, because of the high price of just getting in meaning fly-by-nighters can’t afford to get in.
For a fighter earning $50,000 per year, and with that you have to pay a percentage to a manager and to trainers, which can easily be 20-30%, and it’s not what it seems to be to the public. Careers are short. In the ESPN.com article, one UFC fighter who wasn’t named said there would be a slew of ex-UFC fighters who are broke in a few years, like ex-boxers. The reality is, that is likely to be the case. That’s also proven to be the case with NFL players with short average careers as the number who end up broke within a few years after their playing days are over is high, and most NFL players earn significantly more than all but the top fighters, and that’s the case with top-name boxers who earn tons more than UFC fighters, which is why they continue to fight long past their primes. So that will end up being the case, just because in the majority of cases that’s how things work out, and would be the case if UFC was paying more as well. We’ve already seen most of the big stars of the previous generation, particularly from the Pride era, who didn’t make what UFC headliners make, but earned far more than most UFC fighters made, that are in their 40s, are having financial issues and in many cases still fighting even though their bodies are destroyed.
ESPN compared the minimum pay to that of the NFL or NHL, but that isn’t germane because revenue is different. But as far as a percentage of revenue that goes to the performers, there are a lot of things that are unknown that would have to be factored in to make a fair comparison. But the higher minimums and higher salaries in major sports came because the players got unionized and had collective bargaining agreements. That has led to minimum salaries,$320,000 per year in the NFL, $473,000 for the NBA (a rookie minimum, if you’ve survived a number of years in the league your minimum escalates to more than $1 million), $480,000 for Major League baseball and $500,000 for the NHL (which it should be noted does not have the huge television deals the other sports have, but does draw huge live gates for nearly every game).
While fighters talk about unions, no boxing or pro wrestling company in the U.S. has ever been able to get its performers on the same page to even come close to unionizing. Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White have always said publicly that it’s up to the fighters if they want to unionize and that they aren’t against it. Nevertheless, in Fertitta’s Station Casinos business, the workers aren’t unionized, and that has been a bone of contention with local unions and is really the reason for the Culinary Workers Union of Las Vegas having their New York branch work hard to keep UFC out of the state. They’ve also attempted to pressure sponsors to stay away from UFC or cut ties with them, and have even attempted to get FOX to disassociate themselves from UFC by pointing to comments made by White and some fighters.
In all of the aforementioned sports, unionization and free agency are the two reasons players earn what they do, and while there is legitimate free agency in MMA with other companies, from a fighter bargaining position, with Strikeforce and the Japanese scene going down, in reality, there isn’t. The argument that the leagues are monopolies is true, but in the NBA, for example, there are 30 teams, and there are a finite number of top players and they are all in competition to field the best teams. So there is competition when contracts expire in the open market which escalates salaries, to the point that the majority of teams pay so much that they were losing money. They had to be saved from the issue of balancing not losing money and building a competitive team competing with those more willing to spend and lose money, or in better media markets and having that financial advantage of higher local market television rights. That’s where the salary caps came in. But there is no answer as to what is “fair” when it comes to company profit vs. athlete compensation. Every dollar spent to talent is a dollar less of profit. Many of the complaints about UFC fighter pay and the “U Fight Cheap,” term for the company that goes around comes from boxing promoters, who are in some cases admittedly jealous. Because there is no dominant promoter and no ability to control pay the way UFC can in the marketplace, have to pay so much more for the name fighters and have a far tougher time generating profits because of it. But on the flip side, the UFC model, even if it is paying a lower percentage of total revenue to fighters, does take better care of the up-and-coming fighters on its roster.
As far as average salary, a terribly misleading stat because the top end players skew it badly, and the median salary (where half make more and half make less would be better) and the NBA averages $5.15 million per player, Major League Baseball around $3.5 million, the NHL $2.4 million and NFL around $1.9 million. The WWE would be between $500,000 and $550,000. UFC is absolutely impossible to ascertain. But if they really paid 50%, it would be in the range of $650,000. At 30%, it would be in the range of $390,000 and at 15% it would be in the range of $195,000. My experience is that UFC fighters making $390,000 per year are usually really big names, but the average and the median number (a better figure but one that is virtually impossible to ascertain for UFC fighters and pro wrestlers) are very different.
Fertitta claimed in the interview that the company since it became profitable has created 39 millionaires, but exactly what that means wasn’t explained. If it means the company has paid more than $1 million to 39 different fighters in total over the last six or seven years, that isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds. If they know their fighters finances well enough to know that 39 fighters are worth more than $1 million today, that’s very different and it was never explained. It’s nowhere close to that figure of any of the major sports, but it shouldn’t be, because total UFC revenue still pales in comparison with a major sport.
UFC could go down hard and it’s pay structure is somewhat based on guarding against it. If PPV revenue drops, due to a change in market conditions, consumer burnout, fighters who don’t draw on top, whatever, the bulk of the money paid out drops. The Fox deal gives them more breathing room because there is a guaranteed income base, but it’s also tough because it’s a seven-year deal at a certain figure that won’t be open to a negotiated change until 2019 if it turns out conditions change and the PPV business reacts negatively.
If the bulk of fighter pay was guaranteed, the company would be hurt badly by the kind of revenue drops that took place in 2011, but instead from all appearances, while they did take a hit, you don’t see any noticeable sign of major cost cutting, diminishing the trappings of the product, or even slowing down international expansion. Still, even with a comparison to a lower percentage paid out by WWE, the WWE wrestlers get big video game checks which make a huge difference in annual income to the “have-not” level performers, something UFC fighters don’t get (according to one agent who represents a number of big time fighters, if you are in the advertising for the video game you make money for that, but if you are not, you don’t). And that is something exactly the same. But Zuffa also has probably 300 fighters under contract and generates less income (although not a whole lot less) than WWE during a year. At press time, WWE had roughly 74 performers on the main roster and 44 in developmental, so even paying a significantly lower percentage of total revenue to talent, because they only have 74 main roster performers, the majority of them make very healthy incomes. Developmental contracts are usually $24,000 to $50,000 per year, with the majority at the lower level.
A legitimate major UFC drawing card like Georges St. Pierre or Brock Lesnar earns significantly more than John Cena because of their pay-per-view bonuses, and in the case of St. Pierre, getting a higher percentage of endorsements, if they aren’t injured. But when you have a guy who has done a high-risk style for 23 years, like Rey Mysterio, and has bad knees and is in his late 30s, and missed much of the year with knee surgeries and other injuries, and this happens frequently, he still makes a great income between his downside guarantee, his merchandise sales and video game revenue. Then again, a St. Pierre or a Lesnar only has to fight once a year to make a significantly better income, but if they don’t fight, their money goes down astronomically. But their longevity at the top is more fleeting and can’t be protected. Lesnar after two losses would have likely earned significantly less money, while Cena’s income may vary greatly based on a number of factors, but he is protected from losing matches and no longer being able to headline in a way that will diminish his value while he’s still a viable draw.
But both companies are different from major sports franchises in that the big money is not guaranteed, but dependent upon what you draw, whether it be in PPV sales, ticket sales or merchandise. While Cena is likely an exception, at least as of a year or so ago, a top tier WWE wrestler would not get paid more than $1 million downside, but there are a number of headliners earning more than $1.5 million to $2 million per year.
Barr also noted that not wanting to talk wasn’t limited to UFC fighters, and that even Bjorn Rebney, the CEO of Bellator, wouldn’t talk with them on the subject.
“We actually had every intention of going to a Bellator event in Atlantic City, and Rebney (who is involved with ongoing legal issues with UFC) backed out at the 11th hour,” said Barr. “He didn’t want to pick a fight. He didn’t even want to come across appearing to pick a fight. We felt it was interesting. They have a different business model, a tournament model and they pay guys differently. Even this competitor was afraid to take on the UFC establishment.”


The official numbers for the 12/30 show at the MGM Grand Garden Arena (Brock Lesnar vs. Alistair Overeem) were 13,793 in the building, which was 137 tickets shy of capacity (basically some singles left unsold so you can legitimately call it a sellout), with 10,901 paid and a $3,101,000 gate. It was interesting because Lesnar had not been as great a draw in Las Vegas, or really anywhere as you would think, and this did go virtually clean. The other thing that got little attention is that Lesnar in Las Vegas had always been the super heel, like fever pitch heel in a very different way than a Josh Koscheck or Michael Bisping. With Koscheck and Bisping, people thought they were assholes and didn’t like them. With Lesnar, they hated him with a passion, it was much more of a money drawing heat, not that Koscheck didn’t draw money with GSP. But against Overeem, Lesnar was 100% cheered. There were no boos at all when he came out. He was booed in his post-match interview because there were people who thought he could have given a better performance. Overeem had a mixed response. Lesnar’s hatred was at first because he was the pro wrestler they wanted to see got stomped, and later because Randy Couture was so well liked and Lesnar was still viewed as a pro wrestler, and because Frank Mir was from Las Vegas, and Anaheim was so strongly pro-Cain Velasquez. When Lesnar fought Shane Carwin, he was more cheered as I think coming back from Diverticulitis made him more sympathetic, and here, I think people saw Overeem as an outsider (I noticed the same thing with Cung Le in San Jose of all places, as he had outsider heat since so much of the crowd in San Jose was a “UFC” crowd and not a San Jose crowd), but that kind of negativity will be gone in a couple of more fights. There is definitely an aspect of the UFC audience where they like to believe UFC fighters are superior and will cheer them against big-name outsiders. Lesnar was as effective as anyone in that.


Anderson Silva said that besides his shoulder being hurt, he’s also developed lower back problems and can’t commit to a date to return, but did say he would probably fight in June at the stadium show in Sao Paulo.

 

[dream]

UFC recently purchased a $100,000 car as a bonus to Dominick Cruz as noted by Josh Gross on the Outside the Lines piece.


This coming week’s show is a 1/20 FX special from Nashville. Weigh-ins are at 5 p.m. Eastern on 1/19 on Fuel. Prelims start at 6 p.m. Eastern on Fuel with Nick Denis vs. Joseph Sandoval, Daniel Pineda vs. Pat Schilling, Fabricio Camoes vs. Tom Hayden (a late replacement, an 8-0 fighter from the Team Gurgel camp who is a featherweight moving to lightweight taking the fight on six days notice, replacing an injured Reza Madadi), Charlie Brenneman vs. Daniel Roberts, Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Kamal Shalorus and Jorge Rivera vs. Eric Schafer. The top of the card at 9 p.m. Eastern is Pat Barry vs. Christian Morecraft, Mike Easton vs. Jared Papazian, Duane Ludwig vs. Josh Neer and Melvin Guillard vs. Jim Miller. Guillard vs. Miller will be a three round main event. I believe the three vs. five round thing is now five round main events for PPVs and FOX, but three round main events for FX and Fuel shows, which is to me the best for all concerned. You want five round PPV main events to make the main event feel special, and the four FOX shows per year should be marketed to be live PPV shows. The Ryan Jimmo vs. Karlos Vemola fight for that show was canceled when Jimmo was injured.


BJJ expert Milton Vieira has signed with UFC. Vieira has fought in Japan with Pride and Deep, and has a 13-7-1 record. He’s a tall featherweight and lightweight who has been fighting for 11 years, and most recently was on the 8/12 Strikeforce show in Las Vegas beating Stirling Ford via Brabo choke. He’s fought most of his fights in Brazil, so I could see him debuting on the planned June stadium show.


The flaw (or what CEO Bjorn Rebney argues, the strength) of the Bellator format just came to the fore. The company’s biggest possible match right now (and arguably the biggest possible match thus far in the history of the company) would be a rematch of the Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler match, a strong match of the year contender, with Alvarez going back after the title he held for two years. However, Bellator rules are that you have to win a tournament to get a title shot. Alvarez gave up any chance at the title by opting not to enter the tournament that starts in March. Bellator had seven names in the tournament for the next title shot, with Patricky Pitbull Freire, Rick Hawn, Lloyd Woodard, J.J. Ambrose, Thiago Michel, Brent Weedman and Ricardo Tirloni. The final slot was left open for Alvarez. They are working on an Alvarez vs. Shinya Aoki fight for sometime during the spring season.


A new promotion called the Super Fight League has started in India which includes promotion from Sanjay Dutt (not the wrestler but a famous Indian actor who has also spent time in jail in both 1993 and 2007 on illegal weapons possession charges. Also running the promotion is Ken Pavia, as CEO. Pavia was a well-known agent for fighters until being accused in a lawsuit filed by UFC for giving their proprietary information to Bellator and he got out of the agenting business. They debut on 3/11 with a Bob Sapp vs. James Thompson main event. Sapp has a number of fights scheduled in February and March including in Dubai, Indonesia and Amsterdam.

 

[alr1ght]

It was a crazy few days where almost every single major UFC problem hit at once.
There was the problem of too many shows with not enough stars. The performance enhancing drug issue. The weight cutting issue. Inconsistent officiating. About the only thing missing was a bad judges decision.

The first major casualty of the new schedule came when it was announced on 1/17 that UFC 145, scheduled for 3/24 in Montreal, has been postponed. UFC is still planning on running a show in Montreal over the next few months, and is working on arranging a date, but there were no dates available in April or May due to the Bell Centre not releasing any Saturday night dates because of the possibility of needing them for Stanley Cup playoff games.

It was the first time Zuffa has ever canceled an announced PPV date. Dana White had always spoken about the difference between boxing and UFC is that when a main event falls out, UFC still always runs a show.

The culprit seems to be the inability to get anything close to a viable main event for the show. The only matches scheduled for the show when it was canceled were Che Mills vs. Rory MacDonald, Ben Rothwell vs. Brendan Schaub, Mark Bocek vs. Matt Wiman, Mark Hominick vs. Eddie Yagin, Mac Danzig vs. Efrain Escudero, Chad Griggs vs. Travis Browne and Chris Clements vs. Keith Wisniewski. The future of these matches was not determined at press time, whether they would be added to different shows or saved until the company got a date in May.

There had been talk in recent weeks of headlining Montreal with a Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson light heavyweight title match. White had said this past week that he didn’t want to announce a match for Jones until after the 1/28 FOX show in Chicago and the Rashad Evans vs. Phil Davis fight.

“We made the decision earlier this week that we’re going to postpone our Montreal event,” noted Tom Wright, Director of Operations for UFC Canada. “I don’t have to tell you how important Montreal is as a market for us (three of UFC’s four biggest crowds thus far in its history were at the Bell Centre). The Bell Centre is one of the most best venues for your shows. We just decided that we would reschedule the event. It doesn’t mean we’re not coming back to Montreal. We are. We’re expecting to be back in 2012. It was a scheduling issue. That is what is boils down to. Fundamentally, Montreal is a championship city and we want a championship caliber card.

With the cancellation of the date, UFC won’t have a PPV show between the 2/25 date from Saitama, Japan, and the 4/21 date in Atlanta, an eternity by modern UFC standards. The plan is to still do 14 PPV events, including three from Canada, during 2012. But now the three, the Montreal show, a planned show later in the year in Toronto, and a third show (which we were told would likely be August in Calgary at one point but Wright said that the third city is not confirmed) will all take place closer together.
An interesting beneficiary of this is WWE, as noted to us by someone in the company. As noted in our past studies, while a UFC PPV the night before a WWE PPV usually does significant damage to the WWE number, there is also a noticeable but lesser effect when the WWE show is eight days later. WrestleMania is eight days after this Montreal show. If anything, WrestleMania, one of the company’s few mainstream shows, would get hurt the worst (2010) coming a day after UFC with the idea that a lot of groups of people who no longer watch wrestling will watch WrestleMania with friends once a year. But a lot of those groups still get together now to watch UFC, and getting groups together two straight days, or even two straight weekends, is often overkill. The same goes for places like bars and restaurants ordering the shows. UFC will almost always take precedence with the idea the shows are more popular and draw a higher spending clientele. But if there is no UFC show for two months, it is more likely such establishments will order WrestleMania. In addition, even when Vince McMahon denies the crossover, he does admit to doing worse numbers when shows are in close proximity, stating it’s because the cable channels will give UFC commercial time for shows that otherwise would be earmarked for WWE shows, thus the WWE gets less local cable promotion. Now, during the period from, say 3/10 to 3/24, when ads for UFC 145 will have proliferated, with no other major PPV event (the first big boxing event this year isn’t until May), it is likely the vast majority of those UFC ads will become WrestleMania ads, giving them an unexpected boost in promotion.

In addition, White announced that due to an injury to Mark Munoz, the semifinal on that show would now be Sonnen vs. Michael Bisping, with the winner being the next opponent for middleweight champion Anderson Silva.
Demian Maia, who was to face Bisping, will now face undefeated wrestler Chris Weidman in the third televised match on FOX. Maia, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu world champion and Abu Dhabi world submission champion, will face a Matt Serra protege who was a two-time All-American at Hofstra, who once beat Davis in college wrestling, and who placed third in the nation in 2007 in the NCAA tournament at 197 pounds, and has cut to 185 in UFC.

In this case, it’s a fight that has far more appeal then the original. In fact, when the Bisping vs. Maia match was announced, many, including us, questioned why they didn’t do Bisping vs. Sonnen because it’s a far more marketable television fight, and because Bisping and Sonnen are both opponents who will draw far more interest against Silva than Munoz would. And it wasn’t as if Munoz had broken down the doors where he had clearly earned a title opportunity more than Bisping. But now they only have a little more than a week to promote it.

“He’s been kicked out of politics, he has been kicked out of the real estate business and I am going to kick him out of the middleweight division,” said Bisping. “However it’s not all bad news for him, because with his gift of the gab, Chael has got a bright future as a used car salesman or daytime TV quiz show host.”
“This isn’t the new co-main event because I sold all the tickets,” said Sonnen. “This is the new main event. I am going to knock the teeth out of this snot-nosed Brit who calls himself royalty, who calls himself a Count. I am MMA royalty and America will tune into the Chael Sonnen show next Saturday on FOX. I will personally welcome Bisping to the year two-thousand-and-Chael.

Hours earlier, the company announced it was going to do in-house steroid testing of competitors, and that it actually had started as of the first of the year testing all fighters for performance enhancing drugs before signing them to contracts. Details of the testing were not announced.

“The health and safety of our athletes is our top priority,” said Dana White in the release announcing the policy. “We’ve seen the issues performance-enhancing drugs have caused in other sports and we’re going to do everything we can to keep them out of UFC and Strikeforce. Our athletes are already held to the highest testing standards in all sports by athletic commissions. Our new testing policy for performance-enhancing drugs only further shows how important it is to us to have our athletes competing on a level playing field.”

As noted many times, the nature of the performance enhancing drug issue in sports is that even with the best testing they are impossible to eradicate. But anything short of unannounced random testing of fighters year-round, where all fighters, and not just the ones in California or Nevada high-profile main events are tested with no notice, is going to leave major gaping holes in the program. Ultimately, UFC itself is the only one that can implement this plan. This is a good sign if this is a step toward that direction, the beginning of a company testing that will grow more extensive over time. It’s not nearly so good if it’s just a step the company is taking to make it appear to the public that they are responding to the issue. In a recent Observer web site poll, the drug testing issue, in particular inadequate drug testing, was listed as the leading problem facing UFC today.
While the announcement came almost immediately after news broke of Mohammed “King Mo” Lawal, 31, testing positive for steroids, the decision was made in late December to implement this program according to sources within the company. The positive test result for Cris Cyborg actually came back on 12/23, although it wasn’t made public until two weeks later. The indication we were given is the program may have been a response to all the controversy in December stemming from the Alistair Overeem situation. The program actually went into effect on 1/1, with testing of all the new fighters that have been signed in recent weeks.

The announcement came right after the Nevada State Athletic Commission released that Lawal, 31 had tested positive for the steroid Drostanolone in his “A” sample, also known as Masteron, in testing taken after his 1/7 win in Las Vegas over Lorenz Larkin on the Strikeforce show. A “B” sample has yet to be tested.

Lawal, a former Strikeforce light heavyweight champion who came within an overtime criteria loss of representing the U.S. in freestyle wrestling in the 2008 Olympics, was expected to face Gegard Mousasi for the vacant title in his next fight. The fight was likely to take place on the show after the 3/3 show. While nothing was announced as far as a fine or suspension at press time, it was expected to be a suspension of between nine months and one year, and a significant fine, in the neighborhood of 30% to 50% of Lawal’s $95,000 earnings for the fight. In addition, Lawal’s win over Larkin would almost assuredly be overturned and ruled a no contest.

Masteron, a drug clinically used to treat women with breast cancer, is an anabolic steroid that used to be popular with bodybuilders just before competition because it didn’t add weight, but maintained muscle mass while in a severe dieting phase. The drug is expensive and can be difficult to obtain and is believed to be low on the scale of negative side effects, although fatigue, the last thing a fighter would want, has been linked as a side effect. Generally speaking, the belief is that in most cases it clears your system when it comes to drug testing in ten days, but it’s recommended to discontinue use at least three weeks before a test to be on the safe side in some literature but others have been told to cease two months ahead.

Bill Mahood, a former UFC fighter, who tested positive for it after a loss to Bobby Southworth in a 2007 Strikeforce show in Beverly Hills, CA, said that he had discontinued use about five weeks prior to the fight and tested positive for very low amounts. Two other fighters were caught that year for Masteron by California State Athletic Commission testing. Hermes Franca, who admitted he was having trouble getting down to weight in 2007 for a UFC lightweight title fight with Sean Sherk, tested positive and admitted to use. Current UFC fighter Dennis Hallman tested positive for both Drostanolone and Nandrolone (Decadurabolin) in 2007 on a Strikeforce show in San Jose. Josh Barnett also tested positive for the drug in 2009 as he was attempting to get licensed for his Affliction fight with Fedor Emelianenko that never happened.
“I’m in shock,” said Lawal, who had yet to fully respond to the test result, but did claim when the result came out that he had never used the drug.

Lawal’s manager, HDNet television announcer Mike Kogan said to USA Today that nether he nor Lawal had even head of Drostanolone. He said Lawal doesn’t even use supplements with the exception of iron, but did say he received a non-anabolic steroid shot a few weeks before the fight when he had fluid drained from his knee.
Weight-cutting became a major topic this past week, with a series of circumstances that led to Anthony Johnson, a middleweight who fought Vitor Belfort on the 1/14 show in Rio de Janeiro, missing weight by 12 pounds. Johnson gassed out quickly in a fight that saw him choked out late in the first round. Those close to him said he should have never gone through with it in the first place after his body cramped up from dehydration the day before, although he hardly looked dehydrated, or even bothered, a few hours later when weighing in. Johnson was then being fired after the show.

It was the third time in ten UFC fights that Johnson, who had fought up to that point as a welterweight, had missed weight, all by a significant margin.
Johnson is in an interesting spot. Most likely, if he wins a few fights, and makes weight for those fights, UFC has so many injuries and need for late replacements that at some point, he’d probably have a chance to come back because he is talented. But if he doesn’t stay within shooting distance of his weight class, if he’s called on a week or two notice, he may not be able to make weight then either. If he goes to Bellator, he’d probably be the favorite if he would agree to enter one of their tournaments. But if he signs with Bellator, it’ll be a several year deal and that will lock him out of a UFC return.
Johnson is one of the most exaggerated of weight-cutters in the sport,. While fighting as a 170-pounder, Johnson often weighed as much as 220 pounds when he entered camp, although he was not in top shape at that weight. But he would be 208 pounds in shape. After cutting and rehydrating, he would go into the cage at more than 200 pounds. There are the obvious benefits of being substantially larger. But the huge weight cutting and rehydrating cycle has been questioned. A lot of the fighters cutting to that degree have not performed well in their fights, likely due to the toll that takes on their system.
At the American Kickboxing Academy camp in San Jose, trial-and-error has led to a goal of fighters going into the cage at their training weight, and staying within 15 or so pounds of their weight class. Even then weight cutting isn’t fun, but situations where fighters do drastic cuts and struggle in the fight, having major stamina issues, like Jake Shields against Martin Kampmann, Dan Henderson against Shields, Thiago Alves with Jon Fitch, or Jose Aldo Jr. with Martin Kampmann, are avoided.

But it can also lead to a size advantage over an opponent and that can be a huge benefit both physically and psychologically.
But not only are there issues of performance, but of overall health. In 1997, three college wrestlers died as a result of weight cutting, leading that sport to immediately implement standards and use hydration testing when it came to weight cutting. These have existed since then at many levels and locales in U.S. wrestling. The safeguards wrestling put in are not there in MMA, where there is no regulation of cutting at UFC shows in recent years with the exception of one commission a few years ago that was insistent on it and didn’t allow fighters to go into the cage past a certain weight above what they weighed in at. Other athletic commissions have attempted to put rules in. Ohio has rules in place, but because UFC is the 800-pound gorilla, they do not have to adhere to them because of all the revenue the shows bring in. Massachusetts was looking at putting regulations regarding limitations to how much weight a fighter could put back on from his day-before weigh-in, but were pressured to remove them from the rules.

In recent months, there have been several issues on Zuffa events. T.J. Cook, a Strikeforce fighter, suffered kidney failure after his 7/22 win over Lionel Lanham in Las Vegas. Cook said that as soon as his fight was over, his body started shutting down. “Then, I blacked out. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see.”Cook was actually carried to the cage to get his hand raised, rushed to the back, where doctors determined he needed to be rushed to the hospital. When he got there, the doctors determined he was suffering from kidney failure.“They told me if I hadn’t been brought in, I probably would have died,” said Cook in an interview after recovering.

Cook did recover and still fights. On 12/30, Matt Riddle was pulled from the UFC show at the last minute, with reports his illness that didn’t allow him to fight was due to repercussions of weight cutting.

Johnson started cutting from more than 215 pounds to make 185, his new weight class. After his misses at 170 he decided, or perhaps was told, that he needed to move up. But instead of staying the same size, where he’d still be a big middleweight, he gained even more weight, trying to add more size, resulting in his cutting close to the same similar amount as when he was a welterweight.

There are a number of contradictory reports about what happened. But those associated with him were all insistent that he was well on his way to making weight. He either got to 191.5 pounds or 188 pounds, depending on which version is more accurate. At that point, he collapsed, and the doctors that examined him insisted that he get liquids in his system. Those close to him told us that he probably just should have canceled the fight. With the added liquids, by the time weigh-ins came, he weighed in at 197. Dana White went on television furious, saying it was unprofessional. He was excoriated not just for missing weight, but missing by 12 pounds, but that figure was misleading in the sense had his body not shut down, he possibly would have made it, but certainly wouldn’t have missed by much. His version is that he was just happy he was alive, and even responded on twitter to people harassing him and calling him unprofessional.

His camp made a deal with Belfort, where he would give Belfort 20% of his purse for missing weight, but Belfort also insisted that the day of the fight, he weigh-in at less than 205 pounds. Johnson was 204.2 pounds during a weigh-in during the afternoon, before the fight, which went into the cage past 1:30 a.m. in Rio. UFC has a policy of never announcing the actual weights of fighters at fight time, something that HBO does on boxing telecasts. But White told the announcers to release that Johnson was weighed shortly before fight time at 211 pounds, while Belfort, who made weight the day before, was now 206. Perhaps he did so because Johnson is something of a genetic freak, because he has a small waist for someone who is that size, so at 211, he has the upper body of someone closer to 230, so the weight difference of the two visually looked great, when it really wasn’t as bad as it looked.

It was reminiscent of Daniel Cormier in the Olympics. Cormier, a current Strikeforce star, was the captain of the U.S. Olympic wrestling team in 2008. He wrestled at 211 pounds, and was considered a strong medal threat. Like with UFC, Olympic wrestling has weigh-ins the day before. Cormier was coming down from 238, and on his way down, his body shut down. His kidneys failed and he was rushed to the hospital. Instead of finishing his career with an Olympic medal, his wrestling career ended fighting for life. The incident scared him to the point that he has not listened to the advice of many in the sport who feel that he is too short and has too small of a frame to be a heavyweight, and that he should fight at 205.

Cormier doesn’t dismiss that, but noted that if he does make the decision to drop, which would likely be only if Cain Velasquez is world champion again because while he didn’t discount fighting him, he didn’t relish the idea of facing his friend and training partner. But Cormier, who is not svelte like most fighters, said he would do is sensibly, dropping his late night eating and watching his diet for a long period of time to get his natural weight down to where the cut wouldn’t be so taxing.

But here is the issue. Belfort and Johnson, and the vast majority of fighters, physically torture themselves two nights before and the morning and afternoon before their fights to make weight. It’s really all part of the game. It makes people grouchy. Some call it the worst part of things, but nobody has any answers. The fact Belfort was 206 and Johnson was 211 tells you that had both just fought at 205, both men would be happier, healthier and have a lot more stamina and provide for a better fight with two men far closer to their peak condition. It would be the same for the vast majority of fighters. But the fear of fighting someone naturally 15-25 pounds bigger than you when fight time comes has turned this sport, and several others, into a nuclear arms race of weight cutters. And the reality is, you can cut some water weight, within reason, with minor annoyance, rehydrate and generally not risk health that much. If everyone, say at 185-195, cut to 185, that’s one thing. But people who are 195 generally fight at 170, so if you don’t want to give up size, if you’re 195, you are simply too small to be a middleweight. The best welterweight weight may be 185-188, but some people are just natural 195ers and then what do you do?

The answers aren’t simple because everyone is so indoctrinated to how it’s done. Same day weigh-ins and fighting in your real weight class on paper sounds like the obvious answer. But some people would still cut excessively, and the last thing you want in a striking sport is someone going into a fight with their brains not properly hydrated. Dr. Johnny Benjamin, who writes for MMAjunkie.com, wrote after the Johnson incident, “Despite what the masses have witnessed (missing weight and poor performances) and what health professionals have experienced regarding profound sports-related weight-cutting, a persistent attitude remains: rapid, profound weight-cutting is not dangerous because the athlete’s have been doing it for years and are good at it. Unfortunately, this is faulty logic. Just because many fighters from a wrestling background have been cutting weight for years doesn’t make the practice safe. It merely makes them lucky.
His suggestion is that fighters should not weigh-in at less than 90% of their normal body weight. He suggested also doing weigh-ins ten days before the fight and whatever the weight was, the fighter couldn’t get more than 5% from that figure. If you’re 200 pounds ten days out, you can’t fight at middleweight, for example. But then you’d just be like a wrestler who cuts every week during the season, and do two cuts. But there are standards where bodyfat and hydration levels are checked that are in place for amateur wrestling, giving a number for the lowest possible safe weight class you are allowed to cut to.
When it comes to this issue, there have been no truly dire consequences in UFC history, but there have been close calls. It’s more an issue and a problem. A potential tragedy maybe not waiting to happen, but with plenty of scares in recent months, something that could happen. For that reason, I just hope it’s addressed one year too early instead of one year too late.

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And finally, at UFC Brazil on 1/14, we had the problem of referee inconsistency for the second straight week. This week didn’t involve finishes, but involved a Dusty finish in one match, and stand-ups in another.

Erick Silva came out and destroyed Carlo Prater in :29. After Silva knocked Prater down with a knee to the body, he landed 12 punches on the ground, most to the side of the head, and one to the back of the head, before the match was called by referee Mario Yamasaki. However, with everyone expecting that Silva had won, Yamasaki, in the role of Stanley Blackburn or Tommy Young doing a version of the Dusty finish, told ring announcer Bruce Buffer that Silva didn’t win, but was instead disqualified for punches to the back of the head.

Joe Rogan, in the ring, called over Yamasaki and they watched the replay. The replay showed one inadvertent punch to the back of the head in the flurry. Something like that is commonplace in finishes, because heads move when punches are thrown and in flurries at the finish these things happen. The general rule is that if an illegal blow, such as a punch behind the head or a head-butt or an accidental illegal knee ends a fight, but is not intentional, it would be ruled a no contest. It also could go to the cards if the bout has gone past a certain point, but that wouldn’t be applicable here. But a DQ call would be for an intentional blow, which even if you are going to call the foul, which is virtually never called in this situation, it shouldn’t have been a DQ.

Dana White texted “horrible” to us right after the finish, and went on twitter and at the press conference, while pointing out Yamasaki is a good referee, that he made a bad call. He also paid Silva his win bonus and, like when Jon Jones was disqualified against Matt Hamill, UFC is going to treat it when it comes to booking direction that Silva is coming off a win and on a streak of sub-one-minute wins. He also encouraged Silva to protest the decision.

But since the show was in Brazil, with no athletic commission, that means it falls to the hands of Marc Ratner, the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs for UFC. Ratner acts as the presiding commissioner in places like Brazil and Europe. Ratner was going to review the tape on 1/17. The issue is, I don’t know that they can give Silva the win as most would want because Yamasaki said that he did warn Silva, and the punch to the back of the head came after the warning, and even though Prater was done and even had injured his shoulder, Yamasaki’s stoppage was in his mind calling a DQ, not a stoppage because Prater was unable to defend himself, even though he was not defending himself. So at best it would be ruled a no contest on the intent issue.

Nevada has a provision where, if there is a judgment call regarding an illegal move or something related to the actual finish of the fight, the referee can watch a replay and change his mind. Yamasaki didn’t change his call or appear to want to when Rogan showed him the tape, and UFC itself doesn’t have that rule in place. Although this might lead to such a thing being changed when UFC regulates its own shows.

Later, in the Belfort vs. Johnson fight, ref Dan Miragliotta ordered two stand-ups after very short periods after Johnson had taken Belfort down. He also ordered a break almost immediately when the two were in a clinch. While I don’t buy this for a second, as a fan not knowing anything, it would have appeared that Miragliotta was doing everything he could to facilitate Belfort winning. And given the controversy regarding Johnson, who was expected to be fired over not making weight, and that this was a UFC regulated show, you can see where people would have suspicion. The Rio de Janeiro crowd was quick to boo any type of slowdown in the action, particularly when the Brazilian hero was on his back against an American and little was happening.

The subject of the pay of UFC fighters, which gets heavily debated every week or two on Internet message boards when certain athletic commissions release the pay information at shows, was the subject of an ESPN feature and web site article over the past few days, as well as a Yahoo article.

The investigative series “Outside the Lines” looked at fighter pay on a show that included an interview with Zuffa CEO Lorenzo Fertitta, that aired on 1/15 on ESPN 2. Even before the piece aired, UFC President Dana White started bad-mouthing it on his twitter, but more claiming UFC is chomping at the bit to discredit it.
“I’m excited to smash and discredit ESPN and the piece they did!! So pumped,” was one of numerous tweets sent out by White while he was in Rio de Janeiro promoting UFC 142.

“We wanted to look at what the pay scale is presently, it was not our intent to do the story on how UFC has grown exponentially,” noted John Barr, the ESPN reporter who put together the piece. “We feel that piece has been done. We paid some lip service to that. The main goal is what these guys are making at a time when the company has its first significant deal with a broadcast network and pay-per-view shows are as profitable as ever, what is the reality of fighters pay, not the top 5-10% of the fighters, but fighters across the board.”

The actual piece was about six or seven minutes long, followed by a panel discussion of the topic with Robert Maysey, a lawyer who follows the sport and has attempted to get fighters to work together to garner merchandising deals and perhaps unionizing, former heavyweight champion Ricco Rodriguez, who praised Fertitta but claimed he was blackballed out of UFC by White, and Josh Gross, a reporter for ESPN’s web site, who White has probably been more critical of than any reporter with the possible exception of Loretta Hunt.

But there is an inherent problem in the story that Barr readily admits. When covering a major sport, what the athletes earn is a matter of public record due to collective bargaining agreements. Trying to figure out what fighters make, and what UFC makes, is more difficult. UFC is a private company, and while they do release live gate information after most of their shows, that is the extent of financial information the company releases. The big revenue streams, whether it be pay-per-view revenue, television rights fees both foreign and domestic, any merchandising revenue, sponsorship income are all kept private.

And when it comes to fighters salaries, while some athletic commissions do release the base pay numbers, particularly Nevada, which is the company’s home base and where they run the most often, many do not. Plus, most importantly, the vast majority of the money UFC pays fighters is not released. You don’t have to look any farther than Alistair Overeem, who defeated Brock Lesnar in the main event of UFC’s last show in Las Vegas.

Overeem’s publicly listed pay for the show was $264,285.71 as base pay, plus he received $121,428.57 as his winning bonus. However, a lawsuit filed against Overeem by Knock Out Investments, the parent company of Golden Glory, Overeem’s former management, revealed what the Nevada pay sheets don’t say and what most are in the dark about.

Overeem received a $1 million signing bonus upon inking his UFC contact, with the money spread over his first three fights, meaning he received another $333,333.33 guaranteed for the Lesnar fight. But for Overeem, and virtually every UFC main event fighter on pay-per-view, the number publicly talked about and the real number aren’t even close, due to pay-per-view percentages, which vary based on the fighter.
In the interview, Fertitta noted that 29 UFC fighters have such deals where they get a percentage of pay-per-view revenue. In the case of Overeem, he was to receive $2 per buy after Zuffa company pay-per-view revenue for the show topped $500,000, which would be roughly the first 23,000 buys. If the pay-per-view did 800,000 buys, that would be an additional $1,554,000, putting his total pay in excess of $2.2 million.

The problem is that without the lawsuit, people would be thinking Overeem earned $385,714.28 for headlining a major show. His opponent, Lesnar, was listed as earning $400,000 for the show, but the reality is he also had a pay-per-view bonus locked in, and since he was the more established draw, his bonus percentage would likely be significantly higher.

Within the MMA industry, those complaining about fighter pay continually throw out numbers, usually claiming that only 10% of revenue that UFC brings in trickles its way down to the fighters. But that figure is ridiculous. But what the real figure is for the most part is unknown, because virtually every revenue stream, as well as the actual pay most fighters receive, is also unknown.

“What we did is reach out to fighters, managers, some folks who have worked for Zuffa, and use that 2010 Standard & Poor’s report that 75% of revenue comes from pay-per-view and live events, said Barr. We tried to understand all the revenue streams, pay-per-view itself, costs of production, marketing, all of that stuff. That’s one piece of it. Then, what the guys get paid. We know what’s reported, but we know about all that off the books money, so you have to piece together many parts.

“So you wound up with ranges. Most people come up with a number that’s 10%, some say 6-7%, some high-teens. Lorenzo is on the record saying that’s ridiculous, and is closer toward what the established leagues pay. I didn’t press him on that, but did ask if they’re paying close to 50% and he said, `Yes.’”
Monte Cox, an agent who has 70 fighters under contract, 16 of who are under contract to Zuffa, said how except for the fighters at the top, the rest are struggling and that you don’t negotiate deals with UFC, you take what they offer.

The FTC does have some type of investigation going into Zuffa. The piece said it was an investigation of whether purchasing Strikeforce for $34 million (a dollar figure that Fertitta said on camera for the first time) has led to UFC becoming a monopoly.
Obviously, UFC is not a monopoly, as shown by the different promotions on HDNet, as well as Bellator having television deals. But they control almost every marketable fighter on the North American scene with the exception of a few. It is difficult for a fighter to make a good living outside UFC, although there are exceptions, like Eddie Alvarez, who earns well into the six figures per fight in Bellator. But for those fighters, it’s impossible for them to be considered the best, no matter how many fights they win. And it’s difficult for them to even be considered in the rankings, because to be ranked highly you have to beat guys ranked highly as a general rule, almost all of which are under contract to Zuffa.
Fertitta said UFC has paid out about a quarter-billion in fighter salaries since 2005. But that number would not be anywhere close to 50% of revenues. Fertitta said in a Sports Business Journal article a few months back that the company grosses $400 million per year. Standard & Poor’s has access to their financial information because UFC works on the money of outside bondholders, but only a limited amount gets published. But UFC has been highly profitable from 2006 to the present, with estimates of $76 million in 2006 and a significantly higher profit number in 2010. With PPV falling, the 2011 numbers are likely significantly lower since PPV is the main revenue stream. But those criticizing the numbers have pointed out that $250 million doesn’t appear to add to anywhere near 50% of total company revenue over the past six or seven years for a company that probably hit close to or surpassed the $200 million in revenue range by 2006 and has grown significantly almost every year since then. With PPV bonuses being built into more contracts, Fertitta said that pay to fighters has grown at double the rate of the increase in revenue, which means that whatever the percentage was a few years ago, it would be significantly higher now.

The difference between claims UFC pays 8% and 50% is quite the range and the difference between what could be considered gross underpayment and what would be considered fair payment at least based on the standards of major sports. There is no way the number is anywhere close to 8% as noted in our previous attempts at estimates.
In an attempt to use figures based on Zuffa’s percentage of an 800,000 buy show, which is at best an estimate of how the show did, the $3.1 million live gate, using listed fighter pay, announced bonuses, estimates of unannounced bonuses (admittedly extremely tricky), and percentages of pay–per-view revenue built into the main eventers’ contracts, and you get a very rough figure of 28% of revenue off that event going to talent, and given the bonus structure, that estimate is more likely a little low than a little high. However, for the 1/7 Strikeforce show in Las Vegas, that figure could easily have been greater than 50%.

“In an attempt by (ESPN reporter Josh) Gross and ESPN to do a hack job on us, we were ready this time!,” White posted. “We are gonna blast these hacks!”
He also wrote, “Trust me, I have been part of ESPN hack jobs, that’s why I don’t do those BS shows and why we filmed it.”
“ESPN doesn’t care about this sport, ESPN hates this sport, they hate this sport, they won’t even cover it, they don’t tell the great stories about this sport, they don’t tell stories about the fighters, do you ever see an in-depth story about great fighters, hell no you don’t,” said White in a video UFC produced as a counter argument. “You see this garbage Outside the Lines.”

“They’re dirty. They lie, and they never really give you really all the facts. You can’t even watch stuff like this on TV. From now on, that’s why I didn’t participate in the interview, I refused to participate in the interview, I will never participate in anymore interviews like that, and if I do, I will only do that if we film them filming us.”
It’s a difficult task to know what is and isn’t fair. For one, UFC, as a business, is structured completely differently than the big four team sports, which pay closer to half of total revenue to the athletes. It’s structured differently than boxing, where the major names fighters earn significantly more than UFC’s biggest draws. Georges St. Pierre recently said that he earns $4 million to $5 million per fight, but that figure likely includes sponsorship revenue. UFC has costs associated with producing and marketing shows, and front office expenses, and international expansion costs that a boxing organization doesn’t have.

Plus, the draw in UFC is different than boxing. In boxing, most pay-per-view shows do less than 50,000 buys, but big draws like Manny Pacquiao can do significantly more than 1 million buys, and at a higher price point than a UFC show. Floyd Mayweather vs. Victor Ortiz, for example, grossed $78 million just on pay-per-view revenue, while if UFC 141 was Zuffa’s biggest show of the year and did 800,000 buys, that would be a gross of closer to $36 million, and Zuffa only gets a percentage in the range of half of that. Between live gate and estimated revenue the fight generates originally to the promoters, Mayweather vs. Ortiz would be $48 million and UFC 141 would be around $21 million. Ortiz received a $2 million guarantee and we don’t know what, if any, percentage he may or may not have received. Mayweather received a $25 million guarantee, plus a percentage of all revenue, and is believed to have taken in somewhere near $40 million. Three other fighters on the show earned six figures, most notably Erik Morales at $350,000. But four received less than $10,000 including two prelim fighters who each received $1,500. There are also site fees, HBO replay revenues, and tons of other revenues involved. The general rule for a big boxing event is 70% goes to the fighters, and in this case, it may have been more. But both sports are structured differently.

For the 11/12 Pacquiao vs. Marquez fight in Las Vegas, not including PPV cuts (the show did 1.41 million PPV buys, the largest number for any U.S. PPV event since UFC 100), Marquez received $5 million and Pacquiao received $6 million, while Tim Bradley received $1,025,000 and Joel Casamayor received $100,000. Of the 16 fighters on the show, six were paid less than $10,000 with a low of $1,200.
Virtually every UFC show will do at least 200,000 buys, but the top ceiling for the biggest events isn’t as high, because UFC big events still don’t get nearly the level of mainstream media coverage of a Pacquiao fight. While the main event most often is the key, the main eventers don’t draw as much additional revenue as the two big boxing stars who make tens of millions. Plus, as a general rule, UFC pays undercard fighters better, and markets the shows around the top several matches on a card as opposed to just one match.

The closest business model to UFC is that of World Wrestling Entertainment, which is believed to pay in the range of 13-15% of its total revenue to its performers. And that’s not perfect either because while pro wrestling historically has been about main event wrestlers drawing money, it is no more of a touring brand. Big matches and main event names do make a difference to ratings, PPV and to a small degree, house shows, but not nearly at the level main event UFC fighters do. While some will argue WWE is performance art and not a real athletic competition and thus the performers don’t deserve as much, the dollars WWE derives from its performers is every bit as green as those which UFC derives.

Like UFC, but unlike major sports franchises, both WWE and UFC employ hundreds of full-time front office workers, so comparing the percentage they pay to, say, an NFL team, with far less employees, isn’t necessarily a fair comparison. But on the other hand, like UFC, WWE has been a very profitable business built off the bodies of its performers, for the past several years.

From 2001 to 2004, UFC lost tens of millions of dollars. Fertitta talked of losing $10-12 million in the first year and a similar amount in successive years until getting the television deal. If you are talking about what the fighters were earning then, which is a lot less than now, it was significantly more than the company could afford and remain in business for the long-term. UFC pays more than other organizations, but almost every major MMA company existing collapsed due to financial issues, often paying fighters more than the companies derived in revenue.

In fact, UFC itself before 2005 nearly collapsed under the weight of the debt. But in 2005, the company turned the corner, thanks to a television deal with Spike, and has been running with significantly high EBITDA based on regular Standard & Poor’s Credit reports since that time. But there are untold costs, including those of international expansion, and the cost of getting legalized nationwide and internationally that no other professional sport has had to deal with.

Still, anyone who has been around fighting at any level knows the stories of the fighters who aren’t big stars, in UFC, or other organizations, who struggle by for little money, sleep on friends couches and even go into debt trying to pursue a fighting career.
“The reality is that nobody wanted to talk for attribution,” said Barr. “We talked to everyone. We talked to guys who made millions of dollars, guys in between, and guys at the bottom end of the pay scale.”

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It was notable ESPN said they couldn’t get any current fighters to speak on camera. White claimed that Matt Serra had told him they came to interview him, didn’t like what he was saying, and shut down the interview. Barr said that one fighter in the company told him in specific that if he was to participate in this piece, his UFC career would be over.

UFC’s return piece interviewed Chuck Liddell, who noted being bonused above his PPV percentage at times, Forrest Griffin, who noted that he went from making $30,000 per year as a police officer to making millions, and Serra noted how the UFC exposure allowed him to build his local businesses which include two 10,000-square foot gyms on Long Island.

Barr noted that no UFC fighters would talk on the record, but several were willing to talk. It’s become accepted when you talk to fighters these days, that unlike athletes in other sports, what they get paid, at least for attribution, is not something many are going to say much about. UFC is not a monopoly, as there are untold number of smaller promotions around the country. One competitor, Bellator, owned by media giant Viacom, that will have a very significant television deal with Spike starting in 2013. But they are the controlling major league and with Zuffa’s purchase of Strikeforce in March, leverage that at least some fighters have had at playing two competitors against each other (which resulted in very good contracts for people like Dan Henderson, Gilbert Melendez and Robbie Lawler among others) for top fighters was gone.

“We fleshed out stories on guys on the low end, who make six and six, ($6,000 guaranteed and a $6,000 winning bonus), eight and eight or ten and ten, the scale for incoming fighters,” said Barr. “Even though they wouldn’t attach their names to it, we heard from enough of them. It’s tough for the guys on the lower end. For journeyman fighters, they have to pay for their own training expenses, all the additional expenses that come with being a fighter full-time. It’s a real struggle. Not only are these guys tough as hell, but they really make some serious sacrifices in pursuit of the sport they love, and that becomes evident.”

“By the time you pay your trainer, one experienced fighter told me a training camp costs him close to 10 grand, some 7-10 grand, and he might fight three times a year, so, low end, that’s $21,000, and that’s before he’s paid his management company,” said Barr.
A couple of UFC fighters claimed in an MMAjunkie.com article that while their base listed pay isn’t necessarily high, that’s not the complete story. George Roop said that in his first fight of 2011, a knockout loss to Mark Hominick on a Spike fight, he was listed as making $6,000. He noted that he also got a $6,000 bonus and cleared $20,000 from sponsors (he would have earned $23,000 in sponsors but $3,000 went to his manager). In his second fight, a win over Josh Grispi, also a television fight, he was listed at making $12,000, and said he got another bonus of either $6,000 or $8,000 and made just under $20,000 from sponsors. In his third fight, with Hatsu Hioki in a prelim fight on PPV, he got $8,000, got paid either $5,000 or $6,000 as a bonus and made $19,000 from sponsors, so he cleared $100,000 for the year before management and costs of training. He also noted he was able to get paid for a few appearances as a celebrity and that due to his UFC exposure he was able to get $70 per hour teaching private lessons.

Jacob Volkmann, who won three fights during the year, earned $84,000 in listed purses, $10,000 in unannounced bonuses and $4,700 from sponsors. Of that $98,700, he said 20% went to his management and he paid $1,000 during the year in gym and training fees, but also noted spending $250 per week in gas to and from training.
On 12/30, the three lowest paid fighters were listed at earning $8,000, although virtually every fighter on a UFC pay-per-view show gets a bonus of some sorts, usually a minimum of $5,000, sometimes considerably more, that the public doesn’t hear about. Of the 22 fighters on the show, at least 14 earned in excess of $25,000.

UFC released the unedited interview between Barr and Fertitta that they filmed themselves, the key point being where Fertitta noted that ESPN made $2.8 billion in EBITDA last year, umpteen times more than Zuffa did, and that there was a boxer on ESPN 2's Friday Night Fights show that earned only $275 (this was not for a fight that aired on television, although UFC pays significantly more for dark matches underneath on Spike televised cards that are unlikely to air on television), far less than Zuffa’s minimum, which the piece stated was $6,000 to show and a $6,000 win bonus. In actuality, the Strikeforce show on 1/7 had four fighters on a $4,000/$4,000 purse, and there have been at least two fighters on PPV’s in recent months getting those same $4,000/$4,000 figures. However, in the piece, narrated by Bob Ley, a clip was shown of an ESPN 2 boxing match and it noted that some boxers only make a few hundred dollars for a fight. It’s not exactly the same thing, given ESPN 2 did not promote the fight and pay the talent and these were far lower on the totem poll shows generating far less income than a UFC event. The promoters rely on very small gates and a comparatively minuscule licensing fee ESPN 2 pays and nobody spoke of the percentage of revenue such a show paid the fighters. But, veterans of the boxing business who are aware of how UFC pays and treats fighters overall concurred they take care of its prelim fighters better than any organization around, and perhaps in history.

White blasted ESPN 2 for not paying more of a licensing fee to boxing so the fighters could earn more than a few hundred, and that they should have investigated themselves to complain about how little undercard fighters earn. This led to an exchange between White and Dan Rafael, ESPN’s lead boxing writer on twitter. Rafael wrote to White that ESPN does not pay the fighters, the promoters do, and ESPN pays the promoters a licensing fee. White said that when ESPN is raking in the highest carriage rates of any television station and $2.8 billion a year (an estimate of ESPN’s profits before taxes this year) then they should pay more. Rafael then said his point was that Fertitta was mixing apples and oranges. White then said, “No he isn’t. These guys on ESPN want to say we don’t pay fair and boxing pays more? Who has more money than ESPN? We pay more.”
In reality, UFC does pay more for lower card fighters, as a general rule, but in terms of total pay, Pacquiao and Mayweather by themselves may earn nearly as much as the entire UFC roster combined. Although that also could be wrong given there are no figures released to back that up and exactly what was the total number UFC paid fighters in 2011 is at best a shot in the dark.

Rafael noted ESPN spends very limited money on boxing programming, it’s one of 1,000 sports it shows and spends billions on the NFL, MLB, NBA and NCAA and that if ESPN was paying a licensing fee of millions for a boxing show than it would be reasonable to compare. White then said that’s like Nike saying a factory in China makes the shoes, not us. “How can we be responsible? ESPN, 2 faced liars.”
“How can they say they are not responsible for what ESPN Friday Night Fights guys get paid? When we pay ten times more.
and they are trying to blast us on what we pay guys!? Lol, it’s a joke. Blew up in their face big time.”
Rafael said, “I am not defending any particular story, I am saying Lorenzo’s argument was flawed, that’s all.”
Rafael then wrote, “Blaming ESPN for the purses a promoter pays on an ESPN show is like blaming Fox (or previously Spike or Versus) for UFC purses.”
“You can’t compare ESPN to UFC,” he wrote. “One is a television network. One is a promotional entity. ESPN akin to Fox. UFC akin to Top Rank.”
White then wrote, “We financed the UFC for 6 years and paid all the fighters out of our pockets. And yes, why doesn’t ESPN pay them more/lic fee.”

But when you figure the bottom pay for a UFC fighter, as a general rule, it’s better than the bottom pay for boxers on televised and even opening match guys on major PPV shows, plus UFC is the first sustaining fight company in the U.S. to give fighters insurance (IFL did as well but they didn’t sustain), which is a big deal.
But even a fairly well known mid-level fighter who is popular, but not a draw, such as Krzysztof Soszynski talked about retirement noting the difficulty he had in supporting his family on his UFC pay. A median UFC fighter will earn $30,000 to $85,000 per year, depending on whether they win their fights, and if they aren’t hurt and can get three fights in during a year. Fertitta himself said the average fighter actually winds up fighting 1.6 times per year. That’s why for most fighters, the performance bonuses that range from $40,000 on smaller shows and usually $65,000 to, for the biggest shows, North of six figures, are such a big deal to the average fighters. That is why some guys make agreements to go all out for the best fight bonuses even if they don’t necessarily implement parts of their games in the process.

That can be augmented by sponsor money, but sponsor money has dried up greatly in recent years both due to the weakening economy and UFC changing the rules where sponsors first have to pay UFC a fee, which can be anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000 per year, before they can even have the right to sponsor fighters. This takes all the local small-time sponsors who may be willing to pay $5,000 or $10,000 to sponsor a local fighter out of the picture, and with that so-called sponsor tax, eliminates a sizeable amount of the sponsor’s budget actually going to fighters. UFC argues, correctly, that virtually no other sport would allow advertising on its TV shows and PPV shows without the league getting a cut. There is also the argument they cut out a large percentage of sponsors who stiff fighters, because of the high price of just getting in meaning fly-by-nighters can’t afford to get in.

For a fighter earning $50,000 per year, and with that you have to pay a percentage to a manager and to trainers, which can easily be 20-30%, and it’s not what it seems to be to the public. Careers are short. In the ESPN.com article, one UFC fighter who wasn’t named said there would be a slew of ex-UFC fighters who are broke in a few years, like ex-boxers. The reality is, that is likely to be the case. That’s also proven to be the case with NFL players with short average careers as the number who end up broke within a few years after their playing days are over is high, and most NFL players earn significantly more than all but the top fighters, and that’s the case with top-name boxers who earn tons more than UFC fighters, which is why they continue to fight long past their primes. So that will end up being the case, just because in the majority of cases that’s how things work out, and would be the case if UFC was paying more as well. We’ve already seen most of the big stars of the previous generation, particularly from the Pride era, who didn’t make what UFC headliners make, but earned far more than most UFC fighters made, that are in their 40s, are having financial issues and in many cases still fighting even though their bodies are destroyed.

ESPN compared the minimum pay to that of the NFL or NHL, but that isn’t germane because revenue is different. But as far as a percentage of revenue that goes to the performers, there are a lot of things that are unknown that would have to be factored in to make a fair comparison. But the higher minimums and higher salaries in major sports came because the players got unionized and had collective bargaining agreements. That has led to minimum salaries,$320,000 per year in the NFL, $473,000 for the NBA (a rookie minimum, if you’ve survived a number of years in the league your minimum escalates to more than $1 million), $480,000 for Major League baseball and $500,000 for the NHL (which it should be noted does not have the huge television deals the other sports have, but does draw huge live gates for nearly every game).
While fighters talk about unions, no boxing or pro wrestling company in the U.S. has ever been able to get its performers on the same page to even come close to unionizing. Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White have always said publicly that it’s up to the fighters if they want to unionize and that they aren’t against it. Nevertheless, in Fertitta’s Station Casinos business, the workers aren’t unionized, and that has been a bone of contention with local unions and is really the reason for the Culinary Workers Union of Las Vegas having their New York branch work hard to keep UFC out of the state. They’ve also attempted to pressure sponsors to stay away from UFC or cut ties with them, and have even attempted to get FOX to disassociate themselves from UFC by pointing to comments made by White and some fighters.

In all of the aforementioned sports, unionization and free agency are the two reasons players earn what they do, and while there is legitimate free agency in MMA with other companies, from a fighter bargaining position, with Strikeforce and the Japanese scene going down, in reality, there isn’t. The argument that the leagues are monopolies is true, but in the NBA, for example, there are 30 teams, and there are a finite number of top players and they are all in competition to field the best teams. So there is competition when contracts expire in the open market which escalates salaries, to the point that the majority of teams pay so much that they were losing money. They had to be saved from the issue of balancing not losing money and building a competitive team competing with those more willing to spend and lose money, or in better media markets and having that financial advantage of higher local market television rights. That’s where the salary caps came in. But there is no answer as to what is “fair” when it comes to company profit vs. athlete compensation. Every dollar spent to talent is a dollar less of profit. Many of the complaints about UFC fighter pay and the “U Fight Cheap,” term for the company that goes around comes from boxing promoters, who are in some cases admittedly jealous. Because there is no dominant promoter and no ability to control pay the way UFC can in the marketplace, have to pay so much more for the name fighters and have a far tougher time generating profits because of it. But on the flip side, the UFC model, even if it is paying a lower percentage of total revenue to fighters, does take better care of the up-and-coming fighters on its roster.

As far as average salary, a terribly misleading stat because the top end players skew it badly, and the median salary (where half make more and half make less would be better) and the NBA averages $5.15 million per player, Major League Baseball around $3.5 million, the NHL $2.4 million and NFL around $1.9 million. The WWE would be between $500,000 and $550,000. UFC is absolutely impossible to ascertain. But if they really paid 50%, it would be in the range of $650,000. At 30%, it would be in the range of $390,000 and at 15% it would be in the range of $195,000. My experience is that UFC fighters making $390,000 per year are usually really big names, but the average and the median number (a better figure but one that is virtually impossible to ascertain for UFC fighters and pro wrestlers) are very different.

Fertitta claimed in the interview that the company since it became profitable has created 39 millionaires, but exactly what that means wasn’t explained. If it means the company has paid more than $1 million to 39 different fighters in total over the last six or seven years, that isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds. If they know their fighters finances well enough to know that 39 fighters are worth more than $1 million today, that’s very different and it was never explained. It’s nowhere close to that figure of any of the major sports, but it shouldn’t be, because total UFC revenue still pales in comparison with a major sport.

UFC could go down hard and it’s pay structure is somewhat based on guarding against it. If PPV revenue drops, due to a change in market conditions, consumer burnout, fighters who don’t draw on top, whatever, the bulk of the money paid out drops. The Fox deal gives them more breathing room because there is a guaranteed income base, but it’s also tough because it’s a seven-year deal at a certain figure that won’t be open to a negotiated change until 2019 if it turns out conditions change and the PPV business reacts negatively.

If the bulk of fighter pay was guaranteed, the company would be hurt badly by the kind of revenue drops that took place in 2011, but instead from all appearances, while they did take a hit, you don’t see any noticeable sign of major cost cutting, diminishing the trappings of the product, or even slowing down international expansion. Still, even with a comparison to a lower percentage paid out by WWE, the WWE wrestlers get big video game checks which make a huge difference in annual income to the “have-not” level performers, something UFC fighters don’t get (according to one agent who represents a number of big time fighters, if you are in the advertising for the video game you make money for that, but if you are not, you don’t). And that is something exactly the same. But Zuffa also has probably 300 fighters under contract and generates less income (although not a whole lot less) than WWE during a year. At press time, WWE had roughly 74 performers on the main roster and 44 in developmental, so even paying a significantly lower percentage of total revenue to talent, because they only have 74 main roster performers, the majority of them make very healthy incomes. Developmental contracts are usually $24,000 to $50,000 per year, with the majority at the lower level.
A legitimate major UFC drawing card like Georges St. Pierre or Brock Lesnar earns significantly more than John Cena because of their pay-per-view bonuses, and in the case of St. Pierre, getting a higher percentage of endorsements, if they aren’t injured. But when you have a guy who has done a high-risk style for 23 years, like Rey Mysterio, and has bad knees and is in his late 30s, and missed much of the year with knee surgeries and other injuries, and this happens frequently, he still makes a great income between his downside guarantee, his merchandise sales and video game revenue. Then again, a St. Pierre or a Lesnar only has to fight once a year to make a significantly better income, but if they don’t fight, their money goes down astronomically. But their longevity at the top is more fleeting and can’t be protected. Lesnar after two losses would have likely earned significantly less money, while Cena’s income may vary greatly based on a number of factors, but he is protected from losing matches and no longer being able to headline in a way that will diminish his value while he’s still a viable draw.

But both companies are different from major sports franchises in that the big money is not guaranteed, but dependent upon what you draw, whether it be in PPV sales, ticket sales or merchandise. While Cena is likely an exception, at least as of a year or so ago, a top tier WWE wrestler would not get paid more than $1 million downside, but there are a number of headliners earning more than $1.5 million to $2 million per year.
Barr also noted that not wanting to talk wasn’t limited to UFC fighters, and that even Bjorn Rebney, the CEO of Bellator, wouldn’t talk with them on the subject.

“We actually had every intention of going to a Bellator event in Atlantic City, and Rebney (who is involved with ongoing legal issues with UFC) backed out at the 11th hour,” said Barr. “He didn’t want to pick a fight. He didn’t even want to come across appearing to pick a fight. We felt it was interesting. They have a different business model, a tournament model and they pay guys differently. Even this competitor was afraid to take on the UFC establishment.”

The official numbers for the 12/30 show at the MGM Grand Garden Arena (Brock Lesnar vs. Alistair Overeem) were 13,793 in the building, which was 137 tickets shy of capacity (basically some singles left unsold so you can legitimately call it a sellout), with 10,901 paid and a $3,101,000 gate. It was interesting because Lesnar had not been as great a draw in Las Vegas, or really anywhere as you would think, and this did go virtually clean. The other thing that got little attention is that Lesnar in Las Vegas had always been the super heel, like fever pitch heel in a very different way than a Josh Koscheck or Michael Bisping. With Koscheck and Bisping, people thought they were assholes and didn’t like them. With Lesnar, they hated him with a passion, it was much more of a money drawing heat, not that Koscheck didn’t draw money with GSP. But against Overeem, Lesnar was 100% cheered. There were no boos at all when he came out. He was booed in his post-match interview because there were people who thought he could have given a better performance. Overeem had a mixed response. Lesnar’s hatred was at first because he was the pro wrestler they wanted to see got stomped, and later because Randy Couture was so well liked and Lesnar was still viewed as a pro wrestler, and because Frank Mir was from Las Vegas, and Anaheim was so strongly pro-Cain Velasquez. When Lesnar fought Shane Carwin, he was more cheered as I think coming back from Diverticulitis made him more sympathetic, and here, I think people saw Overeem as an outsider (I noticed the same thing with Cung Le in San Jose of all places, as he had outsider heat since so much of the crowd in San Jose was a “UFC” crowd and not a San Jose crowd), but that kind of negativity will be gone in a couple of more fights. There is definitely an aspect of the UFC audience where they like to believe UFC fighters are superior and will cheer them against big-name outsiders. Lesnar was as effective as anyone in that.

Anderson Silva said that besides his shoulder being hurt, he’s also developed lower back problems and can’t commit to a date to return, but did say he would probably fight in June at the stadium show in Sao Paulo.

3

 

[TheNatural]

 

[alr1ght]

UFC recently purchased a $100,000 car as a bonus to Dominick Cruz as noted by Josh Gross on the Outside the Lines piece.

This coming week’s show is a 1/20 FX special from Nashville. Weigh-ins are at 5 p.m. Eastern on 1/19 on Fuel. Prelims start at 6 p.m. Eastern on Fuel with Nick Denis vs. Joseph Sandoval, Daniel Pineda vs. Pat Schilling, Fabricio Camoes vs. Tom Hayden (a late replacement, an 8-0 fighter from the Team Gurgel camp who is a featherweight moving to lightweight taking the fight on six days notice, replacing an injured Reza Madadi), Charlie Brenneman vs. Daniel Roberts, Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Kamal Shalorus and Jorge Rivera vs. Eric Schafer. The top of the card at 9 p.m. Eastern is Pat Barry vs. Christian Morecraft, Mike Easton vs. Jared Papazian, Duane Ludwig vs. Josh Neer and Melvin Guillard vs. Jim Miller. Guillard vs. Miller will be a three round main event. I believe the three vs. five round thing is now five round main events for PPVs and FOX, but three round main events for FX and Fuel shows, which is to me the best for all concerned. You want five round PPV main events to make the main event feel special, and the four FOX shows per year should be marketed to be live PPV shows. The Ryan Jimmo vs. Karlos Vemola fight for that show was canceled when Jimmo was injured.

BJJ expert Milton Vieira has signed with UFC. Vieira has fought in Japan with Pride and Deep, and has a 13-7-1 record. He’s a tall featherweight and lightweight who has been fighting for 11 years, and most recently was on the 8/12 Strikeforce show in Las Vegas beating Stirling Ford via Brabo choke. He’s fought most of his fights in Brazil, so I could see him debuting on the planned June stadium show.

The flaw (or what CEO Bjorn Rebney argues, the strength) of the Bellator format just came to the fore. The company’s biggest possible match right now (and arguably the biggest possible match thus far in the history of the company) would be a rematch of the Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler match, a strong match of the year contender, with Alvarez going back after the title he held for two years. However, Bellator rules are that you have to win a tournament to get a title shot. Alvarez gave up any chance at the title by opting not to enter the tournament that starts in March. Bellator had seven names in the tournament for the next title shot, with Patricky Pitbull Freire, Rick Hawn, Lloyd Woodard, J.J. Ambrose, Thiago Michel, Brent Weedman and Ricardo Tirloni. The final slot was left open for Alvarez. They are working on an Alvarez vs. Shinya Aoki fight for sometime during the spring season.

A new promotion called the Super Fight League has started in India which includes promotion from Sanjay Dutt (not the wrestler but a famous Indian actor who has also spent time in jail in both 1993 and 2007 on illegal weapons possession charges. Also running the promotion is Ken Pavia, as CEO. Pavia was a well-known agent for fighters until being accused in a lawsuit filed by UFC for giving their proprietary information to Bellator and he got out of the agenting business. They debut on 3/11 with a Bob Sapp vs. James Thompson main event. Sapp has a number of fights scheduled in February and March including in Dubai, Indonesia and Amsterdam.

4 your eyes

 

[parrotbeak]

Can someone at least post some Britney pictures in between each of dream's posts?

 

[dream]

I'M SORRY, OKAY?

 

[Maklershed]

<3 dream posts

 

[parrotbeak]

They are interesting, just difficult to read.

 

[dream]

 

[TheNatural]

Can someone at least post some Britney pictures in between each of dream's posts?

 

[parrotbeak]

Thanks, much better

 

[Chamber]

Can someone at least post some Britney pictures in between each of dream's posts?

 

[Maklershed]

Yama hama!

 

[AiTM]

whos reading these posts?

 

[Maklershed]

<-- this guy (if I'm not at work when I see them)

 

[Chamber]

whos reading these posts?

I tried reading the formatted posts but then lost interest 3 paragraphs in.

 

[dream]

You should read the mma pay one. Overeem might clear 2.2 million for the Brock fight!

 

[parrotbeak]

I read them, sorta. It helps to highlight with mouse.

Here, this is interesting.

T.J. Cook, a Strikeforce fighter, suffered kidney failure after his 7/22 win over Lionel Lanham in Las Vegas. Cook said that as soon as his fight was over, his body started shutting down. “Then, I blacked out. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see.”

Cook was actually carried to the cage to get his hand raised, rushed to the back, where doctors determined he needed to be rushed to the hospital. When he got there, the doctors determined he was suffering from kidney failure.

“They told me if I hadn’t been brought in, I probably would have died,” said Cook in an interview after recovering.

Cook did recover and still fights. On 12/30, Matt Riddle was pulled from the UFC show at the last minute, with reports his illness that didn’t allow him to fight was due to repercussions of weight cutting.

Johnson started cutting from more than 215 pounds to make 185, his new weight class. After his misses at 170 he decided, or perhaps was told, that he needed to move up. But instead of staying the same size, where he’d still be a big middleweight, he gained even more weight, trying to add more size, resulting in his cutting close to the same similar amount as when he was a welterweight.

There are a number of contradictory reports about what happened. But those associated with him were all insistent that he was well on his way to making weight. He either got to 191.5 pounds or 188 pounds, depending on which version is more accurate. At that point, he collapsed, and the doctors that examined him insisted that he get liquids in his system. Those close to him told us that he probably just should have canceled the fight. With the added liquids, by the time weigh-ins came, he weighed in at 197. Dana White went on television furious, saying it was unprofessional. He was excoriated not just for missing weight, but missing by 12 pounds, but that figure was misleading in the sense had his body not shut down, he possibly would have made it, but certainly wouldn’t have missed by much. His version is that he was just happy he was alive, and even responded on twitter to people harassing him and calling him unprofessional.

His camp made a deal with Belfort, where he would give Belfort 20% of his purse for missing weight, but Belfort also insisted that the day of the fight, he weigh-in at less than 205 pounds. Johnson was 204.2 pounds during a weigh-in during the afternoon, before the fight, which went into the cage past 1:30 a.m. in Rio. UFC has a policy of never announcing the actual weights of fighters at fight time, something that HBO does on boxing telecasts. But White told the announcers to release that Johnson was weighed shortly before fight time at 211 pounds, while Belfort, who made weight the day before, was now 206. Perhaps he did so because Johnson is something of a genetic freak, because he has a small waist for someone who is that size, so at 211, he has the upper body of someone closer to 230, so the weight difference of the two visually looked great, when it really wasn’t as bad as it looked.

 

[Chamber]

Johnson started cutting from more than 215 pounds to make 185, his new weight class. After his misses at 170 he decided, or perhaps was told, that he needed to move up. But instead of staying the same size, where he’d still be a big middleweight, he gained even more weight, trying to add more size, resulting in his cutting close to the same similar amount as when he was a welterweight.

God, what a moron.

 

[Heel]

A new promotion called the Super Fight League has started in India which includes promotion from Sanjay Dutt (not the wrestler but a famous Indian actor who has also spent time in jail in both 1993 and 2007 on illegal weapons possession charges. Also running the promotion is Ken Pavia, as CEO. Pavia was a well-known agent for fighters until being accused in a lawsuit filed by UFC for giving their proprietary information to Bellator and he got out of the agenting business. They debut on 3/11 with a Bob Sapp vs. James Thompson main event. Sapp has a number of fights scheduled in February and March including in Dubai, Indonesia and Amsterdam.

I can't wait. Bad MMA never die.

Thank you, dream.

 

[Maklershed]

God, what a moron.

Your new ProElite lhw champion.

 

[parrotbeak]

Did they ever put up a post fight presser for 142 that was listenable to an English speaking audience?

 

[dream]

Bollywood UFC is going to be so awesome, sien916.

 

[TheNatural]

This weight cutting stuff is ridiculous. It is unprofessional to cut it close like this, but it also makes promoters seem like bad guys for calling them out for not making weight when he has such bad consequences. When really, it's they're fault for the several weeks before the fight trying to gain an advantage. It's ridiculous.

 

[Maklershed]

Bollywood UFC is going to be so awesome, sien916.

Gonna get my chaiyya chaiyya on when I watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOYN9qNXmAw&feature=related

 

[parrotbeak]

Your new ProElite lhw champion.

He'll be cutting from 250.

 

[AstroLad]

smh@Johnson

Isn't his camp just a bunch of wrestlers? You'd think if there would be one thing they could help him get right....

 

[Maklershed]

Erick Silva's DQ loss is final and won't be overturned. Bummer for that guy.

 

[sazabirules]

How many fights do you guys think Mark Hunt is away from winning the title? I say 1 or 2 more after he beats up the gatekeeper Kongo.

I saw the UFC plans on having TUF:Australia vs. U.K. That is a lot of TUF this year.

 

[agrajag]

 

[Caspel]

Tito has stated he wants to fight one more time. I say let him fight Rich Franklin in his last match. Win/lose/draw it would be a named fight that he could close his career out with. If Franklin were to lose, he should retire, too.

 

[SteveWD40]

I saw the UFC plans on having TUF:Australia vs. U.K. That is a lot of TUF this year.

Probably much closer in terms of the level of training, but frankly, being from the UK and having lived in Australia as recently as 2006, I would have to lean towards the training level and fighter level being a bit better in the UK, just more exposure and more combat sports heritage.

That said the teams / coaches will be the deciding factor, many of the good, young UK fighters are already in the UFC (Etim, Hathaway, Mann, Young, Lee etc...) but there are always new guys.

I think the meaning of being a TUF winner has changed, look at what past winners have gone on to do compared to recent ones, the only really good recent winner in my mind is Ross Pearson and maybe Nelson, as they keep diluting it they will be left with guys who won't make any impact in their division at all.

 

[Jake.]

yeah, TUF australia would be pretty pathetic. we have a tiny population (20ish mil) and realistically we just don't have a big enough talent pool (to compete against another country such as the UK anyway) for such a show.

 

[ChiTownBuffalo]

I'm trying to think of Aussie fighters. I think there might have been one or two in PRIDE. But nothing else is coming to mind.

How popular is MMA, at least the practice of it,in Australia?

 

[Jake.]

yeah, a few fought in pride. sotiropoulosis is probably the the best known du from here at the moment, but i always thought he was overrated (being amazing at just bjj doesn't necessarily transfer well to mma, which has been shown in his last few fights).

still a pretty niche following. like, any UFC event here sells out instantly (wasn't 110 the fastest selling in history?) but that's really only because drunk du's wanna see a fight. i would imagine less than 250 at something like UFC 110 would have any idea what pride is/was. that was obviously pulled out of my ass, but you get the idea. somewhat related (in terms of 'combat sports'), i doubt the average australian could name a boxer other than ali and tyson.

muay thai and bjj actually have a small following even where i live (adelaide), but lots of disciplines are literally non-existent - wrestling especially. wrestling in australia is about as common as ice hockey.

tldr: afl/australian football), cricket, tennis and soccer (which only blew up since we got into the world cup) are the only things people give a shit about here.

edit: mma isn't shown on australian tv either - big UFC cards are shown on cable (which i don't have) and that's it. hence why i don't post in official card threads anymore because i am always a few days late in watching them as i have to 'obtain' them through other means. japanese mma is actually impossible to watch in australia through legal means.

 

[sazabirules]

The coach for Australia would have to be sotiropoulosis, Noke, or Ebersole. He's lived in Australia for a long time.

 

[Fersis]

I'm trying to think of Aussie fighters. I think there might have been one or two in PRIDE. But nothing else is coming to mind.

How popular is MMA, at least the practice of it,in Australia?

Didnt Reem knocked out Aussie Ben Edwards? Or at least i think he is Australian.

 

[SteveWD40]

yeah, TUF australia would be pretty pathetic. we have a tiny population (20ish mil) and realistically we just don't have a big enough talent pool (to compete against another country such as the UK anyway) for such a show.

Fair enough, I didn't remember it being that big when I was there, to give our US cousins some perspective that is the population equivalent of Greater London alone.

Sydney and Melbourne had some good BJJ clubs and MT but that was it, no actual MMA gyms.

I credit the UFC's push into the UK for much of the progress here, I started training in 2000 and back then you could roll with a Royce Seminar Blue Belt if you could find one, people were mostly doing JKD and only London and Edinburgh (Rick Youngs club) had real grappling being taught on any level.

It wasn't until 2007 ish that MMA gyms started to pop up outside of London. I think the level will only start to improve when we get a few great coaches settling here. Fighters like Pearson and Pickett now all train in the US pretty much full time, when guys like that retire, if they moved back here they could run some great MMA clubs.

 

[SteveWD40]

The coach for Australia would have to be sotiropoulosis, Noke, or Ebersole. He's lived in Australia for a long time.

If the Aussies can claim Ebersole then we are claiming Reem! He was born in Essex and his dad is a Brit (Jamaican but UK citizen)

 

[Maklershed]

Mike Whitehead heading to jail for 1-4 years where he'll lose many prison fights.

 

[sazabirules]

Picks for UFC on FX are due in 6 hours. Hopefully mine are saved this time.

 

[ChiTownBuffalo]

Mike Whitehead heading to jail for 1-4 years where he'll lose many prison fights.

You mean there will be giving up and crying.

What's he going to jail for?

 

[Roland Deschain]

Love that sweet, sweet wall of text.

 

[ShaneB]

Eep, gotta get my picks in.

Also, I'll repeat it, fuck Sportsnet One I want to watch this on TV dang it, and not have to stream it. Blah.

 

[bloodydrake]

You mean there will be giving up and crying.

What's he going to jail for?

sexual Assault..
1.when you have drunk chicks in your bed passed out don't start screwing them
2. when they wake up to you screwing them and ask you to stop.don't continue for another 3 minutes till your done.

1 to 4 years in the slammer ..got what he deserved

 

[TheNatural]

sexual Assault..
1.when you have drunk chicks in your bed passed out don't start screwing them
2. when they wake up to you screwing them and ask you to stop.don't continue for another 3 minutes till your done.

1 to 4 years in the slammer ..got what he deserved

And don't Tweet that if it happens, "everyone loves surprises."

Dana will fire your ass.

(as long as you're not a main eventer)