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Evening news update (10/18)
By Zach Arnold | October 18, 2007
Fox News Fight Game (video here) has a review of the latest edition of The Ultimate Fighter. MMA Madness has a Q & A with Matt Hughes.
Here is the latest IFL SEC filing.
The controvery over Randy Couture’s depature from UFC continues to heat-up. Randy Couture’s agent has officially responded, laughing at Kevin Iole’s Yahoo Sports report about what Couture was making on his latest contract in UFC. One interesting question to ask about a supposed “freeze” clause in the UFC contract with Couture – is such a provision enforceable long-term under US law given that the deals fighters sign with UFC make them independent contractors and not full-fledged employees? For years, smart mark wrestling fans have wondered when a WWE wrestler would sue the company (they hire all wrestlers as independent contractors) based on the issue of enforcing certain rules and standards given their ‘independent contractor’ status.
UFC is launching an online fantasy game.
UFC’s scheduled event for Montreal has been canceled because the HBO deal fell through. BJ Penn will not be fighting on the 12/29 UFC Las Vegas event. Instead, he’s expected to fight on the Super Bowl weekend event.
The firestorm about KOTC fighter Melvin Costa is growing. More reaction here.
Steve Cofield is on an audio binge with MMA guests: Keith Jardine | Wanderlei Silva | Jesse Holland | Neil Davidson. Cofield will be interviewing Dana White tomorrow night at 9 PM EST. Submit your questions here.
Topics: Media, MMA, Pro Elite, UFC, Zach Arnold | 22 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
The online game is awesome!
I am actually happy the Montreal show has been canceled. They had too many shows going on in a short time period. Sometimes less is more.
Didn’t ‘LA Giant’ have SS bolts, Norse runes, and various other Nazi-related tattoos? Joachim Hansen has a pretty sweet spider-web, although I somehow doubt he’s a neo-Nazi and/or minority killer.
ilostmydog-
Norse runes were created thousands of years ago. They were the alphabet of the Norse people. They were not created by the National socialist german workers party.
Joachim Hansen is Norwegian. The populatin of Norway is about 4.5 million. The Norwegians are a minority in the world. For example, China has 1 Billion people, India has almost 1 Billion, Nigeria has around 130 million. The Norwegians are the minority.
I would let Costa fight. It’s easy to pile on the neo-Nazi, but this issue quickly goes down the slippery slope. Federal law in America does not prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of political views. Would you agree with some conservative Midwestern promoter banning Jeff Monson on account of his hammer and sickle? I think that would be bullshit.
Oh and apparently this Costa dude can’t really fight, but has a Mark Hunt-esque chin, so smart promoters can play “whack the Nazi piñata” with the right matchup.
ColumbiaLou-
I am aware that norse runes were not created by the Nazis. The fact remains that many of them, just like the swastika which was likewise not invented by the Nazis, have been co-opted by extremists as symbols for their own uses and thus have given them a racist significance. It’s unfortunate, but still true.
“Joachim Hansen has a pretty sweet spider-web, although I somehow doubt he’s a neo-Nazi and/or minority killer.”
LOL @ spider web tattoos meaning nazi or minority killer.
Signed,
Guy with a spiderweb tattoo 🙂
No doubt about the spider-webs. When I first heard about their meaning to white supremacist groups several years ago, I thought to myself that either there were far more of these guys than I originally thought, or (more likely) that the vast majority of people with spider-web tattoos just thought that they looked cool and had no idea of their significance to crazy people.
First, I agree that the UFC Fantasy Game is pretty cool. I just want to do it to keep track of how right (or wrong) I have been in the past…..
As for Couture….
The last thing Randy Couture wants to do is fight it out in court. Not only will that take up money, but it will also hurt him on his most valuable asset…. TIME. Additionally, if there is a contract dispute, Couture will be playing ball in the Nevada court system. While courts are typically fair and not corrupt, I would never want to be Couture going up against one of the big players in the Nevada Gaming Market.
Before I get to a quote from Sherdog.com, I find it funny that the same website that completely ignored the downfall of Pride is now covering the Couture story with 2 stories a day. Josh Gross is kind of pathetic with his feud in this way. This is from the Sherdog.com article:
“Regardless of the outcome, Walker said that Couture is satisfied “because he made a stand on not only his behalf, but on behalf of some of the other top and upcoming fighters who aren’t being treated fairly. The money isn’t even the issue; it is just the final straw that, combined with other indications, showed him how the UFC appreciated what he’s brought to the sport, which is far more than just his success in the Octagon.””
I find Couture’s stance on this both hypocritical and naive. It is hypocritical because it was the UFC who gave Couture chance after chance after chance to succeed in this sport. They gave him a Light Heavyweight title shot after he lost 2 fights in a row and never beat a Light Heavyweight before. They gave him a Heavyweight Title shot after not competing in the Heavyweight Division for years and honestly not even being deserving of the title shot. And when Zuffa gives him that chance, he quits as soon as he gets 2 victories in a row (something he hasn’t done since 2003).
And it is naive because a lot of the young fighters he is talking about would never have this opportunity if Zuffa was not around. It is not like big time fight promoters are knocking on every single Zuffa fighter to sign them. Japan (and specifically K-1) is not interested in 99% of them. EliteXC could probably sign 5 or 6 guys tops. Every other promotion has done nothing. So these young fighters who Couture feels is getting the shaft have almost zero market value without the UFC. They are worth $30,000 a year tops with Zuffa around. Zuffa pays probably over 30 guys over $100,000 a year (after bonuses), and not to mention to additional sponsorship money coming in because of the exposure.
Perhaps Couture has taken too many shots to the head, but he is talking crazy at this point in his career.
One of two things will likely happen.
1) Couture & Zuffa will make up and he will fight near the end of 2008. By then, Couture will be slowed up enough that the guy he fights beats him up and makes it look ugly.
2) Couture gets away from his contract and fights in early 2009. Even if the UFC has him under contract indefinitely, no court would allow that to stand. They might work out a buyout, and some rich person will buy out his contract for him. By the time Couture fights in 2009, he will be even slower then if he fought in the UFC, and will get beaten down upon.
Either way, Couture has looked slow in his last two fights but has been matched up with the right athletes to make good on it. Add in some luck on his side (Sylvia with bad back & Gonzaga with busted nose) and he has excelled. Anything slower with 9+ months of wait will look like Holyfield in a boxing ring at this point….. Just down right ugly.
To give Sherdog credit, they have made improvements over the last six months in the writers they’ve added to their site. Jordan Breen, Adam Swift, and Tim Leidecker are good people.
One of the links implies that there are “First Amendment” issues with firing Costa. Not so. The First Amendment protects against government, not private employer, action. Now, anti-discrimination laws (either federal or state) protect against certain types of discrimination (such as race or gender), but, with a few exceptions, do not generally protect an employee’s speech. In other words, firing an employee because he’s a minority is against the law, but firing him for saying offensive things on his blog — or having an offensive tattoo — is not.
If the tattoo is *actually* a neo-Nazi tattoo, Shaw should fire Costa. MMA is fighting an uphill battle as it is, without that sort of garbage.
FF
Zach,
I agree with you that guys like Breen & Swift generally write very good stuff. I just don’t like the editorial direction of Sherdog, which falls on Gross’s shoulders.
As for the topic of the fighters being independent contractors… I will first say that I am not a lawyer. However, from my understand of an independent contractor, I would think that this classification would actually HURT Couture more in this case. If he is an employee, then he would have the right to quit at any time. Of course, high level CEO’s have it written into their contracts (as employees) that they have non-compete clauses and such things. So if Couture was an employee with non-compete clauses, it would not help him much.
As an independent contractor, isn’t Randy Couture obligated by law to finish the contract? And if he doesn’t complete that contract, wouldn’t he not be able to work for a rival company until the end of that contract is determined? Which likely would mean 9 months, if not more. And if Meltzer is correct (which he usually is), and the UFC does have a freeze on him if he retires, it will likely be far more then 9 months before we see him fight again (if we ever do).
Like I said, I am not a lawyer, but that is how I thought that was interpreted. I’m sure there are much smarter men in this field that might correct anything I said that is wrong.
Actually, there are employment laws barring offensive tattoos and you can be fired because of them at a number of companies, and it holds up in court every time. Namely, the retail supergiant Wal-mart will fire your ass inside a second if you don’t cover up tattoos on your arms with bandaids or bandages. They aren’t involved in MMA, but it gives you a sense of the fact that the government isn’t on your side in this matter.
This site is claiming Monte Cox is the owner of M-1:
http://www.mmahaven.com/
I’m a lawyer. What Couture can or cannot do depends almost entirely on the contract terms and it is close to useless to speculate in the contract’s absence. Whether he is an independent contractor or employee is immaterial to whether he’s bound by contract terms.
That being said, if the contract was for a certain number of fights with no time limit, Randy’s facing an uphill battle.
FF
“Actually, there are employment laws barring offensive tattoos and you can be fired because of them at a number of companies, and it holds up in court every time. Namely, the retail supergiant Wal-mart will fire your ass inside a second if you don’t cover up tattoos on your arms with bandaids or bandages. They aren’t involved in MMA, but it gives you a sense of the fact that the government isn’t on your side in this matter.”
Luckily I have a job a lot better than Wallmart 🙂
I think I’ll wear short sleeves tomorrow too.
I am fed up with Dana White. Honestly, he has turned into a two-faced scumbag.
I hate to harp on you – but its shit exactly like this that pisses me off about you. Three weeks ago I’d have mistaken you for having a man-crush on how amazing Couture was etc. etc. and you were going off the deep-end when someone said he might be on steroids or HGH and now you write this completely contradictory stuff b/c he’s fucking with the UFC.
How do you not expect ppl to take you for nothing more than a shill when you do stuff like that? Especially when your posts are on other threads on this very site.
I formerly worked for an organization that monitored white supremacist activity (www.newcomm.org), and spiderwebs are definitely not a nazi tattoo, although some nazis certainly do have them. I’ve seen the pictures of Costa, and there’s no mistaking it – that is a nazi eagle holding a swastika.
Pro Elite should offer Costa a choice – they’ll pay for him to have it lasered off and he can make a public statement denouncing racism, or he can never fight in one of their promotions again.
The “spiderweb” was originally a prison tattoo, meaning that one’s “caught in the system”. Later on the meaning was extended to having an addiction (mostly drugs or alcohol). It wasn’t until the 70s that the Aryan Brotherhood tried to make the design one of theirs, saying that it stands for an attack on another race. Nowadays – well, nowadays it more or less just stands for what the wearer wants it to stand for (and given that many people just get tattoos cause they “look cool”, they most probably stand for nothing). Most tattoos can’t be easily categorized, especially since most of them have different meanings all around the world. Take the teardrop under the ey for example. In the US it used to stand for having comitted a murder (or an assault) while in Jail. In Europe it stands for the loss of a loved one while being incarcerated (or just the loss of a loved one), while in Australia and New Zealand it’s forcibly tattooed on child molesters.
And Justin, please don’t call it the “nazi eagle”. In combination with the Swastika it’s a nazi-symbol, but the eagle itself is still the roman standard eagle, that has been used for centuries by roman, german and french infantries.
“I agree with you that guys like Breen & Swift generally write very good stuff. I just don’t like the editorial direction of Sherdog, which falls on Gross’s shoulders.”
The editorial direction of Sherdog falls on the writers, really. What Josh Gross writes is what Josh Gross writes, but believe me, there’s no teambuilding meetings where we drink the Killzuffaberry flavored Kool Aid and then set about tearing the company down.
I know it’s fun for fans and site readers to think there’s some anti-Zuffa campaign behind the scenes, but it’s really not nearly that fun. If I wanted to write an editorial tomorrow that said “Zuffa: Best Creation Since Oxygen”, it would get run, even under the supposedly petty, vindictive hawk eyes of Josh Gross.
Yes, typically a free clause of that type would be considered a non-compete clause that can’t extend indefinitely.
When non-competes are overturned, it is often because they prevent a person from earning a living. Randy has opted for a career in acting, so I think it would be difficult to claim that he’s negatively impacted financially by that agreement to the point that it would need to be overturned because it was inequitable.
Additionally, you have to acknowledge a couple things in Randy’s case:
1. He is older than the age at which most fighters retire from professional competition.
2. During his prime, he fought only two fights a year.
3. He has, in the past, taken a year to eighteen months between fights.
4. He was injured in his last fight (broken arm).
I think that a judge might reasonably find that for Randy to have satisfied his contract by appearing in two fights might have taken up to 24 months under the conditions that he’s fought under over the last five years, and that a reasonable person might assume that in that 24 month period, he might have actually retired from professional fighting.
Giving Randy two years off pretty much puts him out of the game. He’s never going to fight Fedor based on that, unless he does it for UFC.
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The IFL thing is somewhat interesting because Midsummer is kind of a short term VC house. Typically they expect their investments to play out within three years, and the money involved is relatively small (based on their website, between 5 and 50 million dollars).
They got 4 million shares, and based on the recent private placement filings, shares were worth 50 cents or less. This doesn’t really fit the standard Midsummer investment profile.
Also, Midsummer reports that they are a “silent partner” that backs up whatever management has to say. This is a way for the cabal at the top of IFL to strengthen their control over the board, which is already a near stranglehold. Maybe this is an attempt to stave off losing managerial control to a television partner if a pre-existing equity interest option is exercised.
Like everything else I say, this is pretty much an academic exercise, and doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.