Filed under: UFCThe California State Athletic Commission made a mistake with regards to Chael Sonnen’s licensing status, and as a result the fighter might not have to sit out an entire year before he can reapply for a fighter’s license in the Golden St…
The California State Athletic Commission made a mistake with regards to Chael Sonnen‘s licensing status, and as a result the fighter might not have to sit out an entire year before he can reapply for a fighter’s license in the Golden State, according to a report from ESPN.com.
CSAC executive officer George Dodd admitted the error to Josh Gross, saying he had misinterpreted the application of rule 399, which would have required Sonnen to wait a full year between licensing applications.
But since the commission had voted merely to uphold Sonnen’s suspension rather than to revoke or deny his license, that rule does not apply, Dodd said.
“That’s what we came up with,” Dodd told ESPN. “That’s why I needed to go out there with this and set the record straight that he can apply after June 29, after his license does expire, because that’s the legal jurisdiction we have to the end.
“Rule 399 was treated as almost a revocation or denial, but you can’t do that.
“I’m the one that put it out there and the error of putting it out there rests solely on me, but we’re going to correct the situation as we should.”
So what does it mean for Sonnen’s fighting future? For one thing, he can reapply for a license when his current one expires on June 29, 2011.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the commission will grant him a license then, and if he is rejected at that time then he will have to wait a year before he can reapply.
As Dodd told MMA Fighting last week, “rehabilitation” is one of the primary criteria the CSAC will judge Sonnen’s future licensing applications on.
“[Sonnen] is going to have to show that he’s done something to promote the sport, promote goodwill,” Dodd said. “He does a lot of good things already. He talks to kids and stuff like that about making right decisions. But he’s going to have to show that he’s making the right decisions as well. You can say it, but you have to make those decisions yourself.”
It’s a little frightening to consider, but Stefan Struve may be just now getting serious about his MMA career.
Not that he was exactly taking it easy before, mind you. But only recently has the 6-foot-11 Dutch heavyweight hired his own strength and conditioning coach and started to pay close attention to his diet. As a result, the “Skyscraper” is only getting bigger and stronger. And all while he’s still just 23 years old.
“It’s going to be fun,” Struve told MMA Fighting. “I’m looking forward to seeing how much better I am this time. When you look at my last fight, you can see how much bigger I was. After my last fight with [Sean] McCorkle I finally had trainers for everything.”
Between sparring with kickboxer Daniel Ghita and working his ground game with jiu-jitsu champion Remco Pardoel, Struve undoubtedly has a strong team around him. But even more than the training, Struve said, the real difference-maker is his growing comfort level with the bright lights of the UFC.
“To be honest, it may sound weird, but all the things – the media, the fans, the attention I’m getting in the lead-up to the fight, the flight to America – it has become normal. Just like it was normal for me to fight all over Europe before the UFC signed me. I fought on big shows in Europe and that became normal for me. Now every single time I go to fight in the UFC, it becomes more normal, more routine, and that’s a good feeling.”
It’s also a far cry from his Octagon debut against Junior dos Santos. Struve came into the fight wide-eyed and shaken by nerves, and as a result he made it less than a minute before getting rocked by the aggressive Brazilian. A hard right caught him on the side of the head, and the next thing Struve knew he was down, but without realizing how he’d gotten there.
“Then when he hit me, and I woke up. I remember thinking, sh-t, I better do something or I’m going to lose this fight,” Struve said. “Then he hit me again.”
It’s hard to believe that it was only a little over two years ago that Struve was a clueless Octagon rookie. Now at UFC 130 he prepares for his eighth UFC bout against fellow big man Travis Browne, who, at 6’8″ is yet another of the tall trees populating the heavyweight division.
But as Struve knows well, just being big doesn’t win fights, and he’s not altogether blown away by what he’s seen of Browne so far.
“I’ve seen his fights with McSweeney and Kongo. I was in London when he fought Kongo. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed with that fight. I don’t think he was pleased with that fight either. The first round was good for him, but I think the second and third round were just kind of boring. He’s got power in his hands, some good kicks, and his stand-up is pretty good. But when the fight hits the mat, I think the fight is mine. My ground game is better than his and, to be honest, I think my stand-up is better than his as well. If I fight my fight, in my opinion, nothing can go wrong.”
It may be a furious effort, Struve said, but he doesn’t see it lasting very long.
“I expect him to push the pace, especially in the first round and the opening moments of the second and third. But I don’t plan to go there. I like to finish fights early. But I expect him to come after me and try to throw bombs, maybe even take me down. But I’m not that sure if you really want to take me down.”
Fights like his come-from-behind win over Christian Morecraft may be exciting for fans, Struve said, but they’re no fun for the fighter who has the spend the first round taking a beating. Still, it was good to show off an aspect of his game few had seen, even if he hoped never to have to do it again.
“People love to see those kinds of fights. They want to see fights like in ‘Rocky,’ where a guy gets beat up and comes back and wins the fight.” Struve said. “That’s what the fans love. But for me, it was a thing that my coach and I already knew, which is that I have a big fighting heart. I never quit, never give up, and that shows in fights like that. I knew that already, it’s just that now the fans know too.”
It started, as anything worth doing probably should, with a Super Bowl commercial.
Lex McMahon was on the set that day to handle the particulars of a contract for his father, Ed McMahon, who starred alongside MC Hammer in an ad where both men were ov…
It started, as anything worth doing probably should, with a Super Bowl commercial.
Lex McMahon was on the set that day to handle the particulars of a contract for his father, Ed McMahon, who starred alongside MC Hammer in an ad where both men were overcoming financial struggles by selling one ridiculous gold item after another. Jeff Aronson was there as the CEO and founder of the company that would be buying these fictional absurdities, Cash4Gold.
Eventually, the two got to talking.
“We started out with the contract negotiations, and then the day of the shoot we stood around and talked about MMA, but just as fans,” McMahon said. “Never did I think, here’s this big investor for an MMA project. It was quite the opposite; he came to me.”
Aronson had a plan, but he needed help first. That’s where McMahon, a former Marine turned lawyer/entrepreneur, came in.
“Jeff came to me and said he wanted to start sponsoring fighters, and asked if I could help him,” McMahon said.
What Aronson didn’t tell him was why.
“I had starting sponsoring a few fighters through Cash4Gold, just to get a feel for what the temperature was in the industry and what the sophistication level of the managers involved was,” said Aronson. “I wanted to see, really, if they had the business acumen to deal with sponsors. So I dipped my toe into it just a little bit, and then I started keeping a list of which manager would take what deal and how hard I could push them and who would bend and crumble. Some of them were really just looking for paydays for themselves rather than the fighters, including not giving fighters invoices or anything like that. It was unbelievable.”
So Aronson did what any multi-millionaire, self-described “serial entrepreneur” would do when displeased with the quality of the fighter management choices – he started his own outfit, Alchemist Management.
“Lex didn’t know what I was doing, but after a while I told him, ‘Look, I’ve been tracking this for the last four or five months, and I think it’s time for a real company to get involved, jump into MMA management, and start representing these fighters in a fashion that’s not being done right now.”
Aronson started Alchemist in July of 2010, positioning Lex McMahon as president and his old buddy Hammer as CEO. While McMahon insists Hammer is “”very much involved in strategy and planning of the company,” he also seems to be not quite as involved in the day-to-day operations as they might have initially led people to believe.
The grunt work is done by McMahon and the rest of the Alchemist team, which includes a full-time PR man and even their very own “Fight Scientist,” strategic advisor Reed Kuhn, who provides detailed statistical breakdowns of opponents and their tendencies to all the company’s fighters – a service that, Kuhn admitted, some guys take more advantage of than others.
The goal, Aronson said, was to become a one-stop shop for fighters, handling sponsorships, public relations, and negotiating contracts all in-house. The model succeeded in attracting several young, up-and-coming fighters, such as Tim Kennedy, Stefan Struve, Brendan Schaub, and others. It also hasn’t been particularly cheap or easy to pull off, and any ideas of the glamorous life of a sports agent were quickly scrubbed from McMahon’s mind once he got to work.
“A lot of it is herding cats,” he admitted. “Making sure this guy is where he needs to be and that guy gets what he wants.”
And what his fighters want, of course, are fights. McMahon estimates he was exchanging phone calls, texts, or emails with UFC matchmaker Joe Silva “almost every day” about Schaub’s desire for a fight with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira at the UFC’s summer event in Rio. It was, as McMahon put it, “a very concentrated effort” to make sure Schaub got the fight he’d asked for, and in the end it paid off.
Alchemist has also courted controversy, however, by spearheading other public campaigns on behalf of their fighters, such as the series of videos that Jorge Rivera did in conjunction with his sponsor, Ranger Up clothing, in which they mocked fellow UFC middleweight Michael Bisping in every imaginable way before the two met in the cage at UFC 127.
“That was something that [Ranger Up CEO] Nick [Palmisciano], myself, and Jorge all kind of got together and talked through what we could do for that fight,” McMahon said. “Because let’s be honest, before that not a lot of people were talking about that fight.”
By fight time, just about everyone was talking about the videos, including a legitimately enraged Bisping. He would go on to defeat Rivera, but only after illegally kneeing him in the head, and he drew further ire by spitting at one of Rivera’s cornermen when it was all over.
“I wouldn’t change a single thing, and I don’t think Jorge or Ranger Up would either,” McMahon said. “Some of the things that happened afterward were unfortunate, and I was on the record with my views on Bisping’s conduct, but the truth is we put out that content to get a certain reaction.”
The impetus for the YouTube campaign, McMahon said, came straight his business school training.
“It’s a marketing concept. There’s an author by the name of Seth Godin who does a lot of marketing stuff, and he wrote a book called “The Purple Cow.” Essentially the idea is, you’re driving down a country road and mile after mile you see brown cow, white cow, black cow – over and over again. It’s monotonous. Then all of a sudden you see a purple cow, you’re going to stop and wonder about it. It’s remarkable, so you pay attention. What it boils down to is, whatever you do in branding should always be remarkable. It should always stand out in some fashion.”
This seems to be the same philosophy they’ve applied to the management company as a whole. From having MC Hammer show up in flashy suits on fight night, to being the only MMA agency with an in-house fight statistician, it’s clear that Alchemist is trying to stand out from the crowd. Alchemist is also one of the few companies to represent not just fighters, but also MMA coaches like strength and conditioning trainer Jonathan Chaimberg and Grudge Training Center head coach Trevor Wittman.
But at least according to Aronson, the goal isn’t simply to make money off other people’s talents.
“I was watching MMA since back before any of us could afford the pay-per-views,” said Aronson, an amateur Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner who started out training at Renzo Gracie’s New York City academy. “I remember everybody chipping in a couple bucks to go watch it every time, because we had to see it.”
Now, he said, his management company gives him the chance to help the fighters he loves to watch with the business acumen he’s accumulated over the years. As far as what he’s hoping to gain out of it, he insists it isn’t money. Or at least, it isn’t only money. Thanks to Cash4Gold’s success, he has plenty of that.
“This is a legacy-type business for me. This is something that I want to be able to look back on. I want to be able to remember it as, here’s where we did something with the common goal of making sure the fighter came first.”
Filed under: UFC, NewsNow that the California State Athletic Commission has voted to uphold Chael Sonnen’s indefinite suspension, the UFC middleweight will have a long wait before he gets another day in court.
Now that the California State Athletic Commission has voted to uphold Chael Sonnen‘s indefinite suspension, the UFC middleweight will have a long wait before he gets another day in court.
CSAC executive officer George Dodd told MMA Fighting on Thursday that the soonest Sonnen could reapply for a fighter’s license is May of 2012, though he could apply for a second’s license to corner other fighters sooner.
“One of our rules, in our Title IV [of the California Code of Regulations], stipulates that you have to wait one year after an appeal of your suspension or revocation of license. And since he appealed this [on May 18, 2011], it’s one year from the day of denial.”
In other words, Sonnen will either have to sit the next twelve months out or else try and get a license to fight in another commission’s jurisdiction. That most likely rules out Nevada, but several other states – not to mention the U.K., Europe, and Japan – would still remain viable options.
That is, if the UFC is willing to promote a fighter who is still officially denied a license from a major commission like California.
If and when Sonnen does reapply for a license in the Golden State, Dodd said, he would have to show the commission proof of his rehabilitation, much like Josh Barnett was asked to do in his recent CSAC hearing.
“[Sonnen] is going to have to show that he’s done something to promote the sport, promote goodwill,” Dodd said. “He does a lot of good things already. He talks to kids and stuff like that about making right decisions. But he’s going to have to show that he’s making the right decisions as well. You can say it, but you have to make those decisions yourself.”
As for Sonnen’s use of testosterone, Dodd said a therapeutic use exemption is still not out of the question, but the fighter would have to go through the proper channels first.
“What would happen is he would…request it through the athletic commission. The commission would probably request that the medical advisory committee review it. The medical advisory committee would review it and then make a recommendation back to the commission whether or not to approve or disapprove.”
Wednesday’s hearing was not about whether Sonnen was or was not in need of the testosterone injections at the time of his fight with UFC middleweight champ Anderson Silva at UFC 117 last August, Dodd said.
Instead, it was about Sonnen’s misrepresentation of conversations he claimed to have had about that testosterone use with the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Ultimately, the commission found his explanations of those past statements unconvincing.
“That is true,” Dodd said. “That’s why we never brought up more about what happened back then. We didn’t. I didn’t testify because there was nothing I could testify to that would give it more cause aside from what was already said.”
At Wednesday’s hearing Sonnen told the CSAC that conversations with UFC president Dana White had led him to believe he would be “effectively retired” if he wasn’t relicensed this week. As of yet, there is no official word on what the UFC plans to do with regards to Sonnen’s future in the organization.
Filed under: UFCIf Chael Sonnen is to be believed, the California State Athletic Commission’s decision to uphold his indefinite suspension means he is now “effectively retired” from the sport of mixed martial arts. But as we’ve learned in the past, tha…
If Chael Sonnen is to be believed, the California State Athletic Commission’s decision to uphold his indefinite suspension means he is now “effectively retired” from the sport of mixed martial arts. But as we’ve learned in the past, that’s a pretty big if.
Sonnen’s credibility problem was at the heart of the CSAC’s concerns at Wednesday’s hearing. After telling California one thing and Nevada another – and let’s not even get started on his media interviews, which at times have been so outlandish they bordered on performance art – the CSAC decided that they just couldn’t trust Sonnen enough to license him. Not now, anyway.
That’s somewhat understandable. Sonnen stands accused of misusing testosterone and misrepresenting who he told about it, and his arguments surrounding the latter are far less plausible than his story on the former. But before we salt Sonnen away and call it a career, we should remind ourselves that this case has too many moving parts and unpredictable variables to be closed so easily.
For starters, there’s the meat of the issue: testosterone replacement therapy.
According to ESPN.com’s Josh Gross, Sonnen told the CSAC that he needed the twice-weekly injections or else he’d have the testosterone levels “of a 93-year-old man.” That seems a tad extreme, and I’m willing to bet that there aren’t too many nonagenarians out there who could look like Sonnen even if they bathed in testosterone every morning, but it’s almost beside the point.
The CSAC seems far less concerned with establishing guidelines for who is and isn’t qualified to receive a therapeutic use exemption for testosterone – a tricky subject for any licensing body – and way more concerned with beating Sonnen over the head for lying to them about it in the first place.
Again, that’s understandable, and something he should have obviously considered when he regaled the commission with tall tales about conversations that never took place.
But okay, so he lied about his testosterone use to try and save his hide. He’s not the first PED user to opt for ‘total freaking denial’ in this particular Choose Your Own Adventure story. And unlike the ones who stand accused of steroid use, Sonnen actually has a defense with at least some degree of reasonable doubt built in. It’s plausible that an MMA fighter might be able to get a therapeutic use exemption for testosterone. It just so happens that Sonnen wasn’t that fighter, regardless of who he says told him otherwise.
Maybe that’s why the CSAC decided to focus more on the lying than the testosterone. That, plus Sonnen’s ill-timed guilty plea on felony mortgage fraud charges (not that there’s a good time for that), made him look like a man who can’t be trusted. And maybe he is. It does seem like whenever he’s confronted with some wrongdoing he knows exactly who’s to blame – Matt Lindland, some Hispanic guy, etc. – but that someone is never him.
And really, this is a much bigger problem for Sonnen than testosterone is. Which brings us back to his claim that a failure to get his license reinstated would mean retirement. Sonnen attributed that one to UFC president Dana White, suggesting that he believes the UFC would have no further use for him if he can’t get cleared to fight (or coach on ‘The Ultimate Fighter‘) right away.
That, too, seems implausible. Obviously the UFC would like Sonnen to put this mess behind him and get back to work, but he can reapply after his license expires on June 29. He could also fight elsewhere if the UFC truly is fed up with him after today. Trying to appeal to the CSAC’s collective compassion by claiming that it’s either a license or the retirement home for poor old Chael is the kind of thing that could blow up in his face if the UFC does not, in fact, decide to cut him rather than wait a couple more months.
Picture that scenario for a moment. Picture him getting chewed out by White, but keeping his job. Picture him going back to the CSAC next time, hat in hand, saying, ‘That whole effectively retired bit? Yeah, that’s not true either. Sorry.’
How do you think the commission will feel about his trustworthiness then? Sadly, that seems like just another tomorrow that Sonnen is incapable of planning for today.
Filed under: DREAM, FanHouse Exclusive, News, JapanThe only thing Antonio McKee is willing to say for certain is that he won’t be fighting Shinya Aoki at DREAM’s ‘Fight for Japan’ event at the end of the month, as was initially planned. As for why, tha…
The only thing Antonio McKee is willing to say for certain is that he won’t be fighting Shinya Aoki at DREAM’s ‘Fight for Japan’ event at the end of the month, as was initially planned. As for why, that answer is a little trickier, and one he’s keeping to himself for now.
“You know what? So I can fight Aoki in the near future, I’m not going to say anything about it,” McKee told MMA Fighting on Tuesday. “I’ll just say, I’ve heard it was because I just had surgery. I’ve heard there’s something wrong with my visa. I’ve heard I wasn’t getting paid so I wasn’t taking it. But it is definitely my responsibility that the fight’s not happening, and I’ll just leave it at that. Because I want that fight, sooner or later.”
McKee declined to explain any further, saying he was going to “protect myself and protect DREAM” by not disclosing the reason why the bout fell apart.
Of course, keeping quiet isn’t exactly easy for McKee. The 41-year-old lightweight has been known to make somewhat outrageous claims about his own abilities, which he feels were largely unappreciated for most of his career, and recently called the UFC the “new slave masters” after being cut from the organization following a decision loss to Jacob Volkmann in his Octagon debut at UFC 125.
But this time, McKee said, he’s resisting the urge to make a media splash on the subject of DREAM and Aoki.
“I’m just going to plead the fifth right now until it kind of cools off. I seem to be a very hot topic right now in the community of MMA, so I got to be a little more careful about what I say. I’m very verbal and I shoot it straight from the hip, but this is a situation where I’m going to shut my mouth because I think that’s best for my career.”
The next step in that career, according to McKee, is a fight with Rafaello Oliveira at CCF Bushido in Canada on July 23. And once that’s done?
“I would like to take the fight with Aoki right after that, if possible,” he said.
The California State Athletic Commission made a mistake with regards to Chael Sonnen‘s licensing status, and as a result the fighter might not have to sit out an entire year before he can reapply for a fighter’s license in the Golden State, according to a report from ESPN.com.
It’s a little frightening to consider, but 
It started, as anything worth doing probably should, with a Super Bowl commercial. 
Now that the California State Athletic Commission has voted to uphold 
If 
The only thing