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Sunday media slate: Gamblers love Kimbo/Tank
By Zach Arnold | July 29, 2007
Beach wrestling with Gomi & KID.
Kenny Florian wants more stringent drug testing in MMA.
Jake Rossen talks about the impact of Title IX on MMA.
The Fightworks Podcast has an interview with Xande Ribeiro.
Onto today’s headlines.
- MMA Weekly: Mark Coleman ready for return to UFC
- Total MMA: Total MMA radio with IFL & WEC show previews
- The Tallahassee Democrat (Florida): Fighting is in Josh Odom’s blood
- The Boston Herald: Game planning with Gabriel Gonzaga
- Sam Caplan: Extreme Challenge 81 quick results
- Boxing Scene: Vernon Forrest bombs Carlos Baldomir to win WBC title
- The Sweet Science: The Viper is Back, Forrest Batters Baldomir
- Yahoo Sports (Kevin Iole): Flashbacks for Forrest in win over Baldomir
- The Milford Daily News: Trying to kick cancer at first Kickin’s Cancer Martial Artists United for a Cause event
- Prophet Fighting: Money coming in on Tank Abbott vs. Kimbo Slice and I can’t figure out why…
- The Northwest Florida Daily News: Local fighter Danny Ruiz aspires for UFC
- The Orange County Register: Up-and-coming MMA talent on display at ShoXC debut
- UFC Junkie: Drew McFedries confirms UFC 77 fight with Marvin Eastman
- Sportsnet (Canada): ‘The Truth’ to come out soon
- The Anchorage Daily News (Alaska): Sarah Johnston will take over Alaska Fighting Championships
Topics: Boxing, Japan, Media, MMA, Pro Elite, UFC, Zach Arnold | 25 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Kenny Florian quote:
“I’m all for random testing,” he said this week. “Across the board – all season long. I’m all for doing it every month and randomly. That would be great.””
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! If that kind of policy isn’t put in place following the positive tests of Sherk and Franca, it’s going to come back to bite the sport in the ass at some point.
They will definetely have to do that, especially if they don’t want to look shady in comparison to other sports. Just last week has brought many changes to various sports in regard of testing for drugs and “performance enhancers”.
The Tour de France will end it’s relationship with the UCI, and conduct a much more stringent testing regimen next year, after all the turmoil that turned this years tour into a “Tour de Farce”.
And over in the world of football (soccer for you yanks), germanys DFL (German Football League), DFB (German Football Association, the biggest sports governing body in the world) and germanys National Anti-Doping Agency teamed up, and presented new and improved anti-doping rules and regulations, as well as a far-reaching regimen of doping-tests. And by far-reaching they really mean FAR-reaching. They will be conducting random tests, all year long, at the clubs, in training camps (even those that are done abroad!), even in rehab-facilities if a player is injured or reconvalescent. And they will be conducting these tests in EVERY pro-league, from the premier league down to the fourth division! That’s an estimated 5000 players! And they didn’t even have any positive tests up until now, apart from 3 players testing positive for marihuana – over the last 10 years!
That’s what i call making sure that the house stays clean!
Drug testing every month is almost too much. Florian is pissed because he lost to a guy who now got busted for steroids. Sadly for him, Sherk was tested for their fight and came up clean, so Florian lost because of SKILL not STEROIDS.
As for all of these international standards, no sports league in America has anything that stingent. In the NFL, you lose 4 games. In MLB, you lose part of the season. MMA is already worse with many athletic commissions. Having a year away from the sport is more stingent then anything MLB or the NFL does.
…or he was able to properly time his cycle to avoid being caught for the fight with Florian, but screwed it up and was off by a few days for the fight with Franca. Listen to MMAWeekly’s interview with Keith Kaiser.
Props to Florian for going public about wanting better drug testing anf for Pavia openly discussing fighter pay, even if it was a bit of self promotion thrown in.
Pavia is trying to serve his own purposes.
Hockey has multi-million dollar corporate sponsors. They have many games a year to gather revenues. They have TV contracts around the world.
Let’s put it this way…. If the UFC paid a minimum of even $250,000 to every fighter they had per year, they would be out of business. That fact alone means that all his ideas are complete BS.
One last think on Pavia…. He fails to mention that the MAJORITY of team sports owners are multi-millionaires. There was a report two years ago that said every MLB owner except for one was losing money on his team. So these athletes are getting paid money based on profits from other industries (how the owners made their money). The UFC is trying to be a stand alone entity without losing money, and that is why pay is less. Plus, the NHL is on the way out, so that is a horrible example.
The UFC doesn’t need corporate sponsors 45….Coke can come to them.
And you’re wrong if you think your non-sourced “report” about only 1 team making money is correct….incorrect. NHL is very successful in its good markets, the only thing hurting it is the horrid expansion that greedy Bettman and the owners are selfishly pursuing.
Are you telling me a league (NHL) that shut down for over an entire season because teams found it more profitable to not even play games…. That they are successful?
Thanks for the link to our site.
To those who listen, remember this is just a test podcast and there is a slightly annoying microphone malfunction which will be sorted out for future weeks.
And either way you argue it, his logic is completely skewed.
Put the minimum wage of a UFC fighter at $250,000 a year… With at least 125 fighters on the current roster….. That is a minimum of $31.25 Million a year in fighter salaries. Then figure that the top tier guys are going to want a lot more in comparison, and then already you are looking upwards of over $60 Million a year in fighter salaries. With a business that brought in $110 Million of PPV Revenues (Gross) in a year, and no company can survive with a business model of paying employees that high of a percentage of revenues. It is literally impossible.
These sports leagues have taken generations to enter the minds of the consumers and advertisers and develop revenue streams beyond tickets prices. And as one individual pointed out on the thread, Zuffa is running between 25 and 30 events this year. How many events does a sports league run in order to pay these guys such huge revenues? Probably over a thousand. Even an NBA team can have 41 home games a year. If you average $40 a ticket, with 15,000 fans a game…. That is $24.6 Million of ticket sales (not including the bigger $$$ in TV contracts) in order to pay for 12 players.
These numbers alone show that Pavia is full of it.
NHL was in truly brutal condition before the strike, and yes, only a few teams were making money, even when you combined owner operations like arenas into the mix.
I’m sure that some teams are doing better now after the strike, but there are still teams hurting. Some of them are again on the cusp of being sold and moved, and even some of the original teams are practically on life support with their markets (probably because of their owners) in Boston and Chicago.
“Drug testing every month is almost too much.”
– Hardly. And I really don’t get the point of comparing to other US sports. Just because the US, along with China, Italy and a few other historically big sports nations are lightyears behind the forefront in battling drug use in sports does not mean the UFC and MMA should be content with following that lazy trend. Stringent out of competition testing is the only way to go, and twelve tests a year for a given athlete really is nothing at all. With tests before and after each fight, plus random testing during training, a regular fighter with 3-5 fights per year SHOULD be tested pretty much every month.
NHL revenue has come up in the last 2 years. Not so much on the way out.
What Pavia fail to mention is the key to negociating in the 4 major sport is that every player know how much everybody else is making. In the 70’s Guy Lafleur (the habs best player) and Pierre Bouchard (the enforcer hire to protect Lafleur) ran into each other by accident. They dropped their paychecks. Lafleur pick’s Bouchard paycheck and he see that Bouchard was making more than him. The same day Lafleur got a pay rise.
That’s why Dana White do everything to keep the real numbers out of the public eye.
There’s simply no truth to that.
If there is a report that says that — which I highly doubt — it’s completely wrong.
However, let’s just go ahead and say owners are losing money on an annual base. Well, it doesn’t matter because they’re still making tons of money. The team here in Dayton that we follow is the Reds. Carl Lindner paid $67 million for the team in 1999, claimed he was losing money every year, then sold 70% of the team seven years later for $270 million.
He netted $203 million. And he still owns 30% of the team.
If only we could all lose money like that.
“Drug testing every month is almost too much. Florian is pissed because he lost to a guy who now got busted for steroids. Sadly for him, Sherk was tested for their fight and came up clean, so Florian lost because of SKILL not STEROIDS.”
Or maybe he lost to Sherk getting his cycle right that time and skills.
Fighters know exactly when they will be tested and can cycle round that accordingly.
“Fighters know exactly when they will be tested and can cycle round that accordingly.”
Which is exactly why you test every month. You may miss them this month, you may miss them next month, but eventually you’re going to get the hit on the drug or the masking agent or T/E.
You’re extremely likely to find it in the first three months. With random testing only when fighters get in the ring, you may never catch cheaters.
Nice of you to make generalizations about my statement and basically show that either you didn’t even bother to read it or just culled out a stupid interpretation of it to fit your argument.
As I said – the teams that are in good markets and not in the markets that idiot Bettman and his syncophants are foolishly attempting to pursue are very successful. The lockout was basically the culmination of a bitter dispute and the refusal of either side to budge on their stances – put it this way, they settled on the one issue (hard salary cap) and the league’s revenues have risen to the point that the salary cap and average team payroll is HIGHER than the average payroll BEFORE the lockout season.
My two comments in my previous posts were separate.
1.) I don’t think you will see fighters with $250,000 yearly salaries – I’m sure they could if corporate sponsorship was getting aggressively pursued, however Dana White is an pigheaded idiot who does his best to piss all over the feet of people he shouldn’t be.
2.) Your “report” is just another one of your B.S. “facts” you love to present all the time, with absolutely nothing to back them up (other than “I heard/read etc.), to further your causes.
And you have to realize sports franchises are very complicated structures and entities these days. They are set up to lose money on paper in many cases. The Florida Marlins championship team in the late 90’s claimed a huge loss on the franchises books, while another entity was able to claim all the profits – this is obviously a big glossing over of the whole situation, but that’s the basics. Franchises make money in their gain in value – perfect case – the Nashville Predators that are in a terrible market and are going to be moved were on the block to Jim Ballsile for $230M which is about $100M more than the franchise was originally awarded for. I’d hardly call a league unsuccessful when one of its “weak” franchises has doubled in value in less than 10 years.
Whoa, is there a salary debate creeping over from Sherdog or something?
Fighter salaries are fine. It’s called capitalism. The free market. Adam Smith, love that guy.
Fighters will never get yearly salaries. Its a horrible idea for the profession they’re in. Anyone arguing in favor of them needs to try thinking just a little.
I totally agree. It doesn’t make sense to pay someone if they aren’t fighting, it would be nice to see the fighters get paid more (outside of Liddell, Cotoure, Hughes, Fedor) but what can ya do. There’s not too many people that have enough leverage to demand huge salaries and until there’s stiffer competition it’s not going to happen.
But when you see an event that grosses +$30M and has a payroll of $300-400K, that leaves a little to be desired.
The yearly salary idea is a horrible one for fighting because of the massive importance for each bout and the limited number of times one can realistically compete in the sport. If you sign with the UFC for a entry level contract of $100,000 a year for 3 years, and in the middle of year 2, you win the world title, that means you have a year and a half of title defenses with no increase in pay. From the company’s perspective, in a sport as fluid as MMA, would you want to sign guys to 7 year $40 million dollar contracts?
It doesn’t guarantee anyone below the top of the card making more money in the UFC, and in fact, it does quite the opposite. Ask fighters if they’d prefer single fight contracts ad nauseum based on their performance to long term deals and see what they say.
I don’t agree with a salary either, I was just using that as a reference number of how much guys like Pavia think MMA guys should be making in a year minimum. Which is crazy.
Not sure if this has been posted before, but this says a lot about Gary Shaw:
http://www.bet.com/News/GaryShaw.htm
I think it would be nice to see a minimum amount of money per fight. But even then can you justify having to pay $10K to an “unknown”…as Grape Knee High said, it’s the exercise of capitalism. But on the otherhand this doesnt account for the fact that the organization has a great deal more bargaining power than most fighters considering the monopoly-like situation right now.
The fighters don’t have much choice is correct.
1. IFL is losing money like nobodies business. They will likely be gone by the end of 2008 (only because of more stock being sold).
2. Bodog is not using any fighter who costs more then $10,000 a fight, so they are becoming a minor league system.
3. EliteXC is the best of them all, but they are still new, have 1 champion, and haven’t made a profit yet.
At the end of the day, the UFC pays their top tier fighters really well. It is up to the managers to work the best deals from there. If a fighter, based on his skill or experience, is only capable of getting even $5,000/$5,000 from the UFC, then likely he oesn’t even belong there to begin with.