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Rob Maysey: Ali Act should apply to MMA
By Zach Arnold | July 1, 2008
Rob Maysey was our featured guest on the last edition of Fight Opinion Radio (audio here). He was on our show to discuss the new Zuffa LLC merchandise marketing rights agreement that the company wanted fighters to sign.
Today, Rob is back with a new article, making the argument that the Muhammad Ali Act should apply to MMA. Well worth the read.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 14 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
The article about the Ali act is great. It pretty much hits it all dead on the button. I don’t know how anyone could disagree unless they subconsciously hate the sport.
If the Ali act indeed applies to MMA (and therefore logically all combat sports), then would that supersede the authority of states which have boxing commissions to choose to not sanction MMA (and other combat sports)?
Very interesting take on the Muhammed Ali act. I’m a bit torn on Zuffa being the biggest force in the sport.
On one hand I think Dana White is an egomanical prick who is ultimately bad for the sport. Competition will keep UFC on its toes and give more fighters a better chance at better money.
On the other hand Boxing has suffered tremendously from what I consider too many fingers in the pie. The sanctioning bodies are a joke and are completely corrupt. The various promoters find ways to disagree so that certain fights are never made. The networks have limited budgets and thus only showcase one big name fight at a time while providing weak, poor undercards that could boost a show. Too many PPV bouts are put on (for $30 or more) including non-PPV quality fighters (the latino fanbase is most exploited in this area when jokers like Bob Arum force fans to pay $40 for Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. against some no name bum).
It’s a disorganized mess and for the casual fan it’s absolutely too much to try to follow.
I want Zuffa to have legitimate competition and maybe pushing people in the direction of bidding for fight purses could help a little bit but I see the problems with Boxing and know that there is a perfect example of a sport that could really grow if so many corrupt hands weren’t restraining it and one organizing body had control.
It’s tough to say what the right path is here.
Rp
I’m fairly certain that the federal regulation of Boxing, MMA, etc. would only be ‘in effect’ if the state sanctioned said sport; if the state doesn’t license it, the federal regulations would not be applicable.
I guess my next question would be whether the Ali act was actually good for the sport of boxing, as opposed to the financial welfare of the top boxers?
It seems like the largest effect was to mandate free agency for boxers. The other purported benefits of the legislation are invisible to me (but I don’t follow boxing). Are there fair boxing ratings now that weren’t in place in 2000? Do you see better title fights now than you did in 2000? Is this really a golden age of boxing — “boxing heaven … located right here on earth?”
Is there a way to ensure that MMA contracts are fairer without bringing them under this law and would bringing them under this law actually resolve our problems?
My take is that the real problem seems to be the lack of commission oversight, decent managers for fighters, and judicial tests of these unfair (and I think we can all agree likely unenforceable) contract terms.
I don’t think that complete free agency is going to fix these problems, it’s just going to allow fighters to sign bad contracts more frequently, since apparently all of the major promotions are playing by the same unfair (to fighters) rules.
Rob’s side point about forum-shopping brings up a separate topic about fights in unregulated states and on Indian reservations. There are promotions that have made a whole industry out of this (King of the Cage in particular), and I’m not sure that this loophole would be satisfactorily closed by applying the existing legislation to MMA.
I’m agnostic on titles. I think we can agree that the WAMMA title is essentially a sham though. The titles that are meaningful in this sport are largely the ones that come from the Japanese grand prix competitions and UFC (at least in the weight classes that have adequate depth). Other organizations either don’t have a high enough profile, or have a predominance of non-title fights for their titleholders (Pride was a particular violator of this, with the exception of their grand prix events of course).
Point 5, anti competitive practices (meaning restrictive contracts and illegal clauses), we’re back to contracts here. If the contracts are already illegal (and I think the terms that we’re talking about in terms of perpetual rights, negotiation exclusivity, and automatic contract extension are definitely illegal), then why aren’t we addressing this through the courts than by saying that they fall under legislation that makes them “more illegal?”
Indian casinos are not going to replace Vegas for any major promotion, nor do contracts for fights at Indian casinos somehow become untouchable by federal law.
As for the question of whether or not there are better fights, well, yeah. Maybe you missed the whole “boxing resurgence” thing that happened last year and got a ton of press. I am not sure. But that wasn’t a result of more Barrera/Robbie Peden PPVs. It was because the best fights that could have been made were, well, made.
Brent Brookhouse disagrees here: http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2008/7/2/563350/ali-act-not-a-step-in-the
He certainly doesn’t “hate the sport.”
He also seems to know a lot more about boxing than the author.
So, it took eight years for the Ali act to kick in?
The causality connection there is kind of tenuous. And yeah, I must have missed it. I don’t watch boxing.
The bloodyelbow article is a joke. Things were better when Fedor was with PRIDE? I dunno, if it wasn’t for Dana White deciding to put guys through infinite contract hell (you know, the thing the Ali act is intended to stop), we’d have Fedor/Couture this fall. PRIDE’s great legacy was that its 205lb champ fought japanese scrubs for years instead of Ricardo Arona and that Cro Cop/Fedor was roughly two years late.
The causality connection there is kind of tenuous. And yeah, I must have missed it. I don’t watch boxing.
Obviously. Even then, you probably should have noticed when Mayweather/De La Hoya set all sorts of money and buy records along with a sequence of pretty monsterous fights throughout the rest of the year, concluding with Hatton/Mayweather and its 1.5-1.6 million worldwide PPV buys.
The big problem with the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 2000 is basically that even if the promoters, managers, etc. are being misleading to their fighters, the commissions, etc., there is no actual system to enforce the Act beyond filing civil suits (which get costly) or trying to press charges.
It’s a nice set of ideas, but I doubt seriously that things like Don King using his son-in-law Carl as his ‘official’ manager to circumvent the “No promoter can be a manager” rule (which has been around for many decades as the same thing happened with Al Weill in the 1950s when he was matchmaker for the IBC as well as manager for Rocky Marciano) and I’m sure that the options that Donald Trump basically said (paraphrasing here as I don’t have my copy of “Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King” by Jack Newfield here) “You can’t lose Don.” when watching the Tyson-Douglas fight as he had forced Douglas to sign fight options in case he beat Tyson (which led to litigation later when Steve Wynn wanted to promote Douglas-Holyfield while King wanted Tyson-Douglas II) are still around.
The real issue was always keeping the promoters, managers, et al honest, [b]not[/b] recognized what was illegal/immoral; the Act doesn’t really have the fangs to do that (hence the arguments made by some Boxing guys such as Teddy Atlas as well as John McCain to make a federal commission to enforce the Act and standardize the commissions).
Not really since the sanctioning bodies are intentionally vague about the methodology of their rankings so they could put up ‘world class’ contenders such as Gary Lockett (who was made the WBO mandatory and was slaughtered by World Middleweight Champion Kelly Pavlik in 3 extremely one-sided rounds).
In theory, once again, there should be a ‘bias-free’ (IE: no Don King-influenced WBC ratings due to his friendship with WBC President José Sulaimán, etc.) ranking to allow the best to fight the best, but for the sanctioning bodies, all they really care about is having title bout sanctioning fees and they don’t care if the matchups are top vs. top (which are generally harder to set up so they are less appealing in terms of setting up) or top vs. journeyman (or worse). Hell, I remember recently there was 3 champions in the WBA Cruiserweight Championship (Super Champion: Jean-Marc Mormeck/David Haye, Champion: Virgil Hill, Interim Champion: Firat Arslan) which eventually (partially) ‘unified’ within itself when Arslan beat Hill.
The last year (or thereabouts) has shown an increased production of top vs. top matchups as a result of 2 of the biggest promoters out there (Top Rank & Golden Boy Promotions) have ‘buried the hatchet’ (for now) and have allowed their big name guys and top talents to fight each other. So yes, the quality of the fights we’ve seen overall has improved (although there is always going to be politics that holds back some fights, which is ‘natural’ in such an industry).
Given what I stated above regarding the relative lack of oversight/enforcement even with the edict by the federal government on the commissions, I doubt it.
Agreed.
While theoretically you can see guys who are banned by members of the Association of Boxing Commissions (such as Tommy Morrison in his recent ‘MMA’ (really a small glove Boxing rules match) fight in the Arizona Yavapai-Apache reservation Cliff Castle Casino), that has more to do with the lack of ‘nudging’ those states to actually enforce any regulations (or in the case of states without official commissions, a lack of state-side oversight). Of course, the Act doesn’t really do that much on the actual enforcement side (hence the federal commission cries in the past), so once again it is an issue until that is cleared up.
*snip the titles point*
I would counter that the problem is that you have a fighter who is making peanuts that will not be able to fight a Top Rank, a Zuffa, etc. in court on their own bill to redress such contracts. Even if unconscionable elements of the contracts are present and can be struck down or modified under the blue pencil test, the sheer cost of dragging it through the court system discourages pretty much all but the most wealthy fighters out there.
Essentially, the court costs make a huge disincentive to even try to overturn the illegal contracts. In that case, there is a valid point to be made that a federal oversight board (or at least the commissions) should have administrative law mediators that would be able to expedite/lessen the cost of the process to prevent a power disparity with regards to legal recourse.
I don’t think MMA should borrow any legislation from boxing. MMA and boxing are two very different entities. I think free agency in MMA is a horrible idea that will quickly degenerate into the mess boxing is mired in: too many titles/sanctioning bodies/promoters, too many weight classes, and too many huge matches that are never happen due to politics.
If anything, MMA should get a fresh look and come up with something that better fits its current situation. Something that ensures fighters make a fair portion of the money they bring in might not be so bad.
You really don’t see free agency in Boxing; Arum, King, De La Hoya, Duva, Shaw, DiBella, et al tend to sign their fighters (especially the top ones) to multiple fight contracts and put them in their stables. It’s actually more similar to the promotion-based model in MMA than it is being given ‘credit’ for.
It’s actually more similar to the promotion-based model in MMA than it is being given ‘credit’ for.
In that promoters have deals with fighters and prefer to showcase them on cards they run, yes. I mean, that’s how one would essentially define a promoter. Where it differs is when Don King, Bob Arum, Lou Dibella, and so on are willing to ceed control of telecasts to HBO/Showtime/whomever to get airtime. They’re also willing to work amongst themselves if they feel that there is money to be made on a mutual basis. They also don’t create their own titles, though certain promoters hold more cache with certain ranking bodies than others (King with the WBC, Kohl with the WBO).
What really confuses me is when people talk about how the MMA model is superior to boxing in that it creates better fights and doesn’t have a huge array of belts. Like, do they live in the same world as me? I’m pretty sure there’s no big groundswell of interest in the fight that will come out of TUF8, nor do I see a whole lot of people getting psyched for “dream matches” like Leben/Bisping and Silva/Irvin. And when it comes to title belts, there’s an array that makes boxing look healthy in comparison. Zuffa has two 155, 170, 185, and 205 pound champions alone!
As a counter point, networks such as HBO, Showtime and ESPN have cultivated their own ‘in house’ Boxing department/team and in HBOs case has established a reputation over the last few decades of bringing together big fights by being the big money man (since most of Arums, Kings, etc. fights that they offer HBO, Showtime, etc. are pretty much fully funded by the ‘money man’ network or in some (rarer) cases in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, the casinos), they expect the promoter to concede ground on the presentation.
I’m not quite sure how much ‘insurance’ Spike or Versus gives Zuffa in comparison to HBO, Showtime, et al with Boxing in order to leverage their hand and try to strong arm Zuffa into allowing them to control the productions themselves.
To be fair to Zuffa, they did send some of their fighters in the past to PRIDE but they eventually stopped as PRIDE didn’t seem to reciprocate on the ‘fighter trading’ deal that was at least implied; those types of situations have happened quite a bit in Boxing (as can be seen in the Arum/King on-off feud for the last few decades).
To me, this is the big difference (although, especially in the case of the WBC & King, there is a level of control by a particular promoter over an organization’s belts), although historically there was promoter control of the belts when there weren’t any sanctioning bodies or just the NBA as the ‘competitor’ to the lineal belts (Mike Jacobs gaining most of the weight class championships in his Carnival of Champions comes to mind).
But yeah, overall there are differences between how the sports promoters have approached their contracts but there are also similarities and one of them is that ‘free agency’ isn’t really prevalent in Boxing since the promoters lock you up tight and use you at their pleasure (just like Zuffa did with numerous fighters who weren’t willing to re-sign on the spot) and there has been a lot of behind the scenes wackiness (which, as I mentioned elsewhere, is well covered in Don King’s case by “Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King” by Jack Newfield) that Zuffa has been similarly accused of.