« The Ultimate Fighter Season 5, Episode 10 | Home | Column: Michigan MMA legislation not up to par »
Friday fight notes: Heat-up for Baroni/Shamrock
By Zach Arnold | June 7, 2007
Sam Caplan on the K-1 Dynamite attendance numbers. More notes at The Fight Network. More K-1 show numbers analysis from The Long Beach Press-Telegram. MMA Weekly breaks down all the information. In short, the amount of paid tickets not bought by K-1 was 3,674. The amount of paid tickets bought by K-1 to distribute was 39,083. Combine the two and that’s where you get the misleading number of 42,757. The documented number of people through a turnstile at the Coliseum was 18,340.
Jake Rossen on the war of words between Frank Shamrock and Phil Baroni.
Jackson vs. Henderson set for September 8th in London?
The IFL stock closed at $1.00/share on Thursday. The low point was $0.85/share.
E! Online talking about Quinton “Rampage” Jackson: My impressed witness reports the beefy dude was “really nice and laying on the charm,” and was surprisingly “superhot, in a badass/scary way.”
Roger Huerta now booked for TUF 5 finale show.
Chuck Liddell’s policy for women at the clubs – “Just say yes.”
Chuck Liddell appeared on The Late Show on Thursday night. Video of the segment should be available on the official CBS site of The Late Show.Video source and commentary.
Onto today’s headlines.
- The Detroit News: Michigan House grapples on combat sport
- MMA HQ: Diego Sanchez vs. Hayato “Mach” Sakurai at UFC 74?
- UFC Junkie: Source – Diego Sanchez/Ali Sonoma relationship riles UFC
- USA Today: Federation hopes grappling takes hold
- SportsNet (Canada): Sam Stout in the mix?
- MMA Fever: Kick Tito’s ass in a video game
- The Fightworks Podcast: MMA in the Mainstream Watch
- Mike Coughlin: Brock Lesnar’s MMA potential
- Five Ounces of Pain: Dana White radio interview notes
- Minnesota Public Radio: Cage fighting gets cornered
- MSNBC: MMA opens to mixed reviews at Coliseum
- The Ithaca Times: MMA talk of the times
- The Associated Press: Tommy Morrison gets ready for MMA debut
- The Arizona Republic: Tommy Morrison’s opponent a no-show so far
- Komikazee: UFC and Fans, a love-hate relationship
- MMA on Tap: Forrest Griffin discusses Keith Jardine loss, Ramirez match-up, and his health
- MMA Weekly: Will Phil Baroni get a UFC title shot?
- The Irish Whip: Is Rampage just another Buster Douglas?
- Xtreme Couture MMA: Sam Stout heads to Florida
- Frankly Franky: Annoyed about TUF 6
- The Glenwood Springs Post Independent (CO): Mixing it up – 43-year old Craig Sjoerdsma is ready to take a swing at MMA
Topics: Boxing, HERO's, K-1, Media, MMA, Pro Elite, StrikeForce, UFC, Zach Arnold | 16 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Shammy, Shammy, Baloni….
From the Jake Rossen article….
“Phil doesn’t get this, but I’m an artist,” said Shamrock. “I study the art of fighting.”
“Frank’s an artist?” Baroni grunted. “After I knock you out, I’ll buy you a box of crayons and you can be an artist.”
Excellent promo skills by Baroni. Frank was handled by Renzo and will be manhandled by Baroni.
Handled by Renzo? Hardly.
By the way, any news about Morton and why he refused to take the post fight test?
I’m a little confused as to why people are reporting the attendance as over 40,000 people. The turnstile count was only just over 18,000. Yes, over 40,000 tickets were bought, but FEG bout 39,000 of those tickets!
It would one thing if the attendance was counted as some how MLB teams do it (some teams use a turnstile/head count for official attendance, while others report on tickets sold) where they just go by tickets sold. So, if 35,000 tickets are purchased and only 20,000 show up because it’s a rainy day, they report the attendance as 35,000. But I can live with the 35,000 number because those tickets were actually purchased by individual customers, and not the actual teams themselves!
If CSAC, or whoever handles these records allow the 40,000-plus figure to stand then it sets a dangerous precedence that you can buy an attendance record. If you can buy the record, then it really has no meaning and they should just stop wasting tax payer’s money in hiring officials to track attendance.
You know, Calvin Ayre has a ton of money and doesn’t mind losing it. Even though he couldn’t attend the event, he should book the LA Coliseum for a big show. Then he should set the price of every ticket at $5 and then go out and buy every single available ticket from his own promotion. Bodog would then hold the U.S. MMA attendance record, a record no promotion would likely be ever to break.
Bottom line, tickets that a company sells to themselves should not count towards official attendance.
I got to run, my plan is to visit my own website 30,000 times today and then tell potential sponsors that I got 30,000 page views today.
I hear ya Sam.
If you pay me a cent a click. I’ll visit your website 60K times….
quote of the year.
Sam Caplan did a great job in reporting on the attendance, and he is mentioned in the MMAWeekly report that just went up. Here is MMAWeekly’s reporting and analysis of the various K-1 numbers: http://www.mmaweekly.com/absolutenm/templates/dailynews.asp?articleid=4100
Ivan, great report.
The part about 13,600 comps being reported but only six tickets marked free being counted at the gates is most interesting.
Why do I get the feeling there is a dumpster somewhere in LA with a bunch of Dynamite USA!! tickets in unopened boxes?
What do you think of a Casino buying up large quantities of tickets to give to high rollers, then? The Casino is inflating the potential attendance figures if they overpurchase the amount of tickets. Of course, unlike the case of an internal purchase, they technically are their own business.
For some reason I doubt that the number of tickets sold (less than 4k) will make it into the Japanese newspapers…
Hehe, they need an asian Zach Arnold to read all the english press and report on it in Japanese.
Tomer:
If they are comps and the comps are used and it’s a reasonable amount, then I think it should count. But buying your own tickets just to create a false perception shouldn’t count.
Look, I know FEG isn’t the first company to buy their own tickets. It goes on all the time. Heck, major movie studios buy tickets for a lot of Hollywood blockbusters in order to skew public perception of a movie and break records. But we’re talking about FEG buying 39,000-plus tickets measured against the general public buying 3000-plus.
If the public bought a huge number and FEG bought a few thousand to break the record, that’s one thing. But 39,000? C’mon.
FEG buying such a large number and allegedly selling them? Sounds strange to me. Maybe, they “sold’ them to radio stations, etc. for them to give away as prizes? I don’t know.
J Breen, if you’re reading this, I enjoyed you on the SDS this past Wednesday. Thank God too, since you talked the entire time. What type of format are you planning for your show?
“J Breen, if you’re reading this, I enjoyed you on the SDS this past Wednesday. Thank God too, since you talked the entire time. What type of format are you planning for your show?”
Thank you, hopefully I was kosher today as well. I don’t really TRY to talk like that, it just happens. I actually prefer when people cut me off.
As for the format for my show, I wanna get some fan input. So I’ll fly by the seat of my pants, feel it out, see what people want, then try to combine stuff people dig with a larger umbrella of coverage.
Less “Holier than Thou”(Josh Gross), more “Man of the People”. But not “Stoned Surfer” (Greg Savage). If you’ve got a flow like TJ but have a bit more content that’d be wicked. I listened to an old MMAEvolution radio show a few days ago and forgot how good TJ can be as a foil when he’s got good people to work with.
By the way, I called Luke from BloodyElbow out. He’s going down. HARD.
I am praying to the MMA gods that Rampage vs Hendo is in London.
Looking at the fighter payroll for k1 dynamite, i was amazed that “warpath” was paid the same as saku $30,000 Morton $100,000 for his first fight? Lesner 1/2 million? I don’t believe that. I know there is of course “undisclosed payments” such as say another mil to Royce maybe a half mil to saku for their “names” but the whole thing stinks.
$100,000 to morton? And all he has to do is pee in a cup to get it?
I doubt he has a career in mma after that beating he incurred, not to mention he’s suspended. So no reason not to pee in the cup, take the money and try something else.
I know this whole promotion from the very beginning defied logic, but wtf?
Maybe you can look into this Zach, because those #’s don’t make sense in any promotion.