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Monday madness: Ayre says Fedor is Bodog 4 Life
By Zach Arnold | April 8, 2007
By Zach Arnold
Explanation of title post here.
Kakutolog notes a Tokyo Sports report claiming that there is consideration of booking Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Kazushi Sakuraba for the Tokyo Dome on 10/11, which would be the exact date of the 10th anniversary of PRIDE.
On Friday, I wrote a post about the IFL’s recent stock plunge. Amazingly, there is a second MMA company that is actually publicly traded on a stock exchange. Compared to the IFL, that stock is doing far worse. Sun Sports & Entertainment Inc. (trading under the ticker symbol SSPE.PK) is the company behind the Art of War events booked by Guy Mezger in Texas.
They ran their first show on March 9th at American Airlines Center in Dallas, claiming over 6,000 paid with a $500,000 USD gate and $150,000 USD in profit. They have more shows lined up in the near future. The SUN stock had a 52 week high of $97.60. The stock on Friday closed at $0.16/share. Press releases were recently written, claiming that speculators might raise the stock price to $0.90.
Moving on
Last week, Akira Maeda claimed that the old elements of DSE would not go away from the ‘new’ PRIDE. He named both the ticket and production companies (allegedly linked to Nobuyuki Sakakibara) specifically. Today, in the PR released for the 5/20 Saitama Super Arena show under Zuffa management, they announced the ticket prices for the show. The same structure as past DSE events — 100,000Y for VIP seats, 30,000Y for RRS, 17,000Y for Stand S seating, and 7,000Y for A-class seats. Also, the same employees from DSE are being kept on board (using the same offices — used by DSE – and the same phone number of 03-5464-1531). With just a month to go until the first Zuffa-owned PRIDE show occurs, it will be fascinating to see how smooth or how chaotic the transition will be.
In a media press briefing on Monday, Nobuyuki Sakakibara stated that DSE would maintain the operations of PRIDE until the end of April, with Zuffa taking over on May 1st under the PRIDE FC WORLDWIDE banner. While a President hasn’t been named for the new PFW company, Sakakibara indicated that the new choice will likely be someone in the company promoted to the top position.
Onto today’s media headlines.
- The Underground Forum: Was Vince McMahon right about MMA?
- Wrestling Observer Live: 4/8 edition with Loretta Hunt
- Fight & Life (Manabu Takashima): UFC 69 photo gallery
- Royal Burnell: UFC is on SportsCenter – so what?
- The Galveston Daily News: UFC 69 a sight to behold
- AM New York: Long Islander Serra grabs title, stuns UFC
- Todd Martin: Turmoil comes to the MMA rankings (LA Times)
- The Associated Press: Matt Serra pulls off surprise win against GSP
- NBC Sports: UFC 69 post-show press conference video
- Gambling 911: Fedor to continue fighting in Bodog (Calvin Ayre comments on the PRIDE contract situation)
- The Houston Chronicle: Extra ring work helps Serra win
- The Canadian Press: St. Pierre apologizes for fight performance
- UFC Junkie: Josh Koscheck probably lost a MySpace friend
- Wrestling Chronicle: Matt Serra’s win good or bad for UFC?
- Marketwire (PR): PrimEdge Inc. gets broadcast and distribution rights for Absolute Fighting Championships
- The Baltimore Sun: UFC 69 adds intrigue to welterweight, middleweight divisions
Topics: All Topics, BoDog, Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, UFC, Zach Arnold | 15 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
The Gambling 911 article didn’t reveal much. Fedor must be giving a lot of promoters a headache right now.
Yeah, their plan was to throw a show or two and then use the stocks to raise the capital to continue running. I don’t see these guys making it through the year.
As for Bodog … they’ve got Fedor so long as they agree to hemorrhage money running in Russia. Honestly, I expect them to throw about a dozen monkey wrenches into Zuffa’s cogs over the next year but the entire company is one raid away from being shut down completely. Smart fighters should be choosing between the K1 alliance and Zuffa.
Bodog might be a good place to hold out for a higher paycheck, but you have the chance of becoming obsolete in the grand scheme of things. There’s enough legitimacy in the UFC HW division now that being outside of it for longer than a year will cause your stock to drop. People are already looking at Fedor’s past year fighting cans in PRIDE and questioning his legitimacy.
Did you just pull the “Fedor is Bodog for life” quote out of your ass?
The only thing the Gambling 911 article says is that he doesn’t have a contract with Pride. There’s nothing in there about him being contracted to Bodog, other than for the 1 fight he has this month.
The “4 Life” title is a parody of the “NWO 4 Life” bits circa the 1990s.
This MMA Madness site that you talked about in a previous post, is it worth signing up for? Do you have to pay money to sign up? I want to read what you wrote about what the IFL is doing wrong.
Now that someone else has mentioned the MMA Madness registration…
Zach, I don’t know if this is important to you or not, but you might want to point out to your contacts at MMA Madness that mandatory registration is the easiest way to isolate yourself into irrelevancy.
Zach — next week, can we get a headline reading: “Bif Naked: ‘Fedor is 2 Sweeeeeeet!’ ”
Also, what’s with those ridiculous stories by Christopher Costigan? If ever there was a propaganda website, it’s gambling911.com. Every article is a Calvin Ayre puff piece: “According to legendary billionaire playboy, philanthropist, and 1984-2006 People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive Calvin Ayre, …”
How much do you think the UFC would offer Fedor?
High comedy here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xq1bCjeNGg
Tito/Rashad pull-apart from the pay per view.
Watch for the look on Forrest’s face…
I imagine with the way things have gone, Zuffa won’t make Fedor an offer until after the Lindland fight. If lightning strikes again, Fedor’s stock will drop faster than the IFL’s.
Interesting point, ‘Rollo the Cat’ – but I don’t see Fedor’s career being finished from one fluke loss in his near-perfect career.
Lindland is waaaay over his head in that fight IMO, and although internet MMA hardcores love him in the strange, inexplicable way that internet puroresu hardcores love Akira Taue, I don’t see him pulling off what would be the upset of the century.
More for today, here’s an image of the flyer DSE distributed for the LW Grand Prix:
http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k231/combatchaz/gp.jpg
Shows Diego Sanchez and Matt Hughes — not sure where that’s coming from at this point, though.
Standard Pride practice to include fighters in promotion that aren’t going to actually fight in the event. How many fighters were slotted for Pride34 that didn’t end up on the card? 5 or 6?
Swick talked about during a Sherdog interview about going down to 170 lbs. Would be a good move for him, and only make the Welterweight Division even stronger.
I for one would like to point out how people shit all over Wanderlei Silva for his loss to Henderson and then in a very similar situation and fashion Matt Serra defeated GSP….
Don’t really see anyone bashing UFC, GSP etc. in the same way…