Filed under: UFC, NewsFighters from now on will be screened for performance-enhancing drugs prior to signing with the UFC or Strikeforce, Zuffa announced Tuesday.
This announcement comes off the heels of two straight Strikeforce events with drug test …
“The health and safety of our athletes is our top priority,” UFC president Dana White said in a press release. “We’ve seen the issues performance-enhancing drugs have caused in other sports and we’re going to do everything we can to keep them out of the UFC and Strikeforce. Our athletes are already held to the highest testing standards in all sports by athletic commissions. Our new testing policy for performance-enhancing drugs only further shows how important it is to us to have our athletes competing on a level playing field.”
Current UFC and Strikeforce fighters will continue to be drug tested before and after fights as well as randomly in accordance with respective athletic commissions.
The policy of screening potential signees for PEDs officially came into effect Jan. 1.
Joe Rogan issues explanation for calling out referee, Mario Yamasaki for highly questionable call in Erick Silva‘s DQ loss to Carlo Prater at UFC 142. It is all an unfortunate situation, we hope is at.
Joe Rogan issues explanation for calling out referee, Mario Yamasaki for highly questionable call in Erick Silva‘s DQ loss to Carlo Prater at UFC 142. It is all an unfortunate situation, we hope is at least overturned to a No Contest.
Anthony Johnson‘s legs got tired in his fight with Vitor Belfort at UFC 142. Johnson has since been cut from the UFC.
Um…maybe referee Dan Miragliotta stood up Vitor Belfort and Anthony Johnson a bit quickly…say some critics.
Jon Jones is too sexy and walked a fashion catwalk runway in Brazil.
Georges St. PierrewantsNick Diaz to win…but probably not ’cause he likes him.
Dana Whitehas some words in response to ESPN‘s “Outside the Lines” segment. You can watch Lorenzo Fertitta‘s entire uncut interview: here.
Because it’s so great, you can watch Jose Aldo‘s celebration in the stands after his victory against Chad Mendes in UFC Rio again and again: here.
Wow! This is the hottest shoot ever with Arianny Celeste and Chandella Powell. Thank you, Paparazzo! Enjoy the gallery below and find MORE pictures: here.
Filed under: MMA Media Watch, UFCUFC President Dana White promised before ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported on fighter pay that the UFC would release a video of Lorenzo Fertitta’s full, uncut interview with ESPN. But what the UFC actually posted online…
UFC President Dana White promised before ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported on fighter pay that the UFC would release a video of Lorenzo Fertitta’s full, uncut interview with ESPN. But what the UFC actually posted online on Monday was something more than that — it was a full-on rebuttal of the Outside the Lines report that featured not only Fertitta’s comments but also comments from White and some of the UFC’s fighters.
White introduced the UFC’s video by referring to the Outside the Lines report as a “piece of trash” and “one-sided.” And while Outside the Lines is generally well-respected for producing high-quality sports journalism, White also said he doesn’t respect the kind of journalism that ESPN does.
“They’re dirty, they lie, and they never really give you all the facts,” White said.
The UFC’s response makes the case that the pay scale in the UFC is better than the ESPN report would have had viewers believe, noting that many UFC fighters have become rich for what they did inside the Octagon. However, the Outside the Lines report didn’t dispute that — Outside the Lines acknowledged that the UFC’s best draws are doing well financially. Outside the Lines was more concerned with how much the entry-level fighters are making.
Where the UFC’s rebuttal report is lacking is in offering any specifics about how much money the low-tiered fighters are making. Fighters like Chuck Liddell, Forrest Griffin and Matt Serra are featured saying they’re satisfied with their pay, but those three guys are popular former champions. There still isn’t a lot of information available about how much entry-level fighters are making. Fertitta says specific payroll numbers are not something the UFC is interested in revealing.
“We’re not hiding anything from anybody, it’s just that we don’t publish it for everybody to see,” Fertitta says. “We’re not a public company. There’s no reason for us to do that.”
The strongest part of the UFC’s response comes at the very end, where Ken Shamrock is shown after his final UFC fight talking about how much money he made in the UFC. Shamrock was featured on ESPN talking about how fighters don’t get paid enough by the UFC, so that quote from Shamrock is a strong rebuttal.
But featuring Shamrock is something of a distraction from the real issue at hand. The issue isn’t whether well-known fighters like Shamrock are making good money, it’s whether the undercard fighters are making good money.
The UFC has also chosen not to release information about how much fighters are making from sources like sponsorships and pay-per-view bonuses. For some fighters, those sources of income represent more than what they make in their purses. But we don’t know for sure which fighters are getting those kinds of bonuses because the UFC has chosen to keep that information private.
Ultimately, Outside the Lines and the ESPN response offered two sides of a story. And neither side has told the whole story.
UPDATE: Later on Monday the UFC posted the entire 47-minute interview with Fertitta on YouTube. That video is below.
Hours after ESPN’s Outside the Lines aired an investigation of the way the UFC pays its fighters, the UFC released its own video of a portion of UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta’s interview with ESPN — a portion that di…
Hours after ESPN’s Outside the Lines aired an investigation of the way the UFC pays its fighters, the UFC released its own video of a portion of UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta’s interview with ESPN — a portion that didn’t make it on the air, in which Fertitta said UFC fighters make better money than boxers who fight on ESPN.
In that interview, Fertitta points out that ESPN is in a better financial position than the UFC, and yet boxers who appear on ESPN’s Friday Night Fights make less money than fighters who appear on basic cable fight cards in the UFC.
“ESPN’s gonna make $2.8 billion,” Fertitta said. “ESPN — do you know what fighters make on ESPN fights? There was a guy who walked away in this last fight here in Vegas. … He walked away with $275 for a four-round fight.”
Fertitta said that compared with what those boxers make, the UFC’s typical entry-level fighter pay of $6,000 to show and another $6,000 if they win is a good contract.
“I think six and six is pretty good compared to that,” Fertitta said. “There’s multiple guys on those ESPN cards that make in the hundreds of dollars. I can tell you that our fights that we put on cable, on Spike TV or on Versus, we pay ten times to the fighters what ESPN pays to their fighters. Ten times. And we don’t make $2.8 billion. I can tell you that right now.”
ESPN and the UFC aren’t completely comparable, as the UFC is a promoter, while ESPN is a broadcaster that pays a license fee to boxing promoters. And ESPN reporter John Barr acknowledged in the Outside the Lines piece that entry-level UFC pay is “far in excess of the paydays for many boxers who, at the lowest levels, fight for hundreds of dollars a night.”
But Fertitta makes a fair point: Will Outside the Lines also investigate how much the boxing promoters who do business with ESPN are paying their boxers?
Fighter pay is an important issue that should be tackled by journalists. But it’s an issue in both boxing and MMA, and ESPN’s report could have been strengthened by providing more context by contrasting the pay of UFC fighters with the pay of boxers.
UFC President Dana White said that his company taped Fertitta’s entire interview. It remains to be seen whether the full, uncut interview will be made available to the public, either by the UFC or by ESPN.
Filed under: MMA Media Watch, UFCSunday morning marked the airing of an Outside the Lines segment on ESPN that was denounced by UFC President Dana White before he had even seen it — a show that presented the UFC’s pay model as one that richly rewards …
Sunday morning marked the airing of an Outside the Lines segment on ESPN that was denounced by UFC President Dana White before he had even seen it — a show that presented the UFC’s pay model as one that richly rewards a handful of favorite stars while paying the majority of fighters as interchangeable drones.
White has already promised a response, and he’ll surely say that ESPN’s report contained incomplete information about how much the company pays its fighters. And he’ll surely be right, for the simple reason that the UFC, like many private businesses, keeps what it pays its workers confidential. ESPN deserves credit for attempting to uncover the closely guarded secret of how much UFC fighters actually make, but specific dollar amounts were lacking in this report.
For all the work that went into the Outside the Lines report, we still don’t know how much the UFC really pays its fighters.
“Outside the Lines has spoken with more than 20 current, former and potential UFC fighters, as well as agents and promoters,” ESPN’s John Barr said as he strolled around a cage in the televised segment. “To a person, they say UFC fighters have not received their fair share of the company’s rapidly increasing revenue. Nearly all of them also refused to speak on camera, for fear the UFC would blackball them.”
But the fact that ESPN couldn’t get any active fighters to speak — and especially to reveal specific dollar amounts — was the biggest flaw in the report. The report did make a strong case that highly paid UFC fighters make far more than low-level fighters make. In that respect the UFC follows a pay model similar to that of Hollywood studios, where a handful of stars make the bulk of the money, and the bit players are left with much less.
And while UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta claimed that the UFC pays its fighters in the neighborhood of 50 percent of all the promotion’s revenues, ESPN’s investigation made a convincing case that the UFC actually pays less than that.
However, there were also some weaknesses of ESPN’s reporting, which pegged the actual amount the UFC pays its fighters as “roughly 10 percent of the revenue.”
ESPN.com initially reported that the median annual income for UFC fighters was $17,000 to $23,000 a year, citing figures compiled by Rob Maysey of the Mixed Martial Arts Fighters Association. ESPN later corrected that report and said the $17,000 to $23,000 figure was actually the median pay per fight, not per year. However, even those corrected numbers do not appear to include sponsorships, bonuses and other forms of income that UFC fighters make.
And median pay per fight isn’t necessarily a particularly telling statistic. Consider a low-level UFC newcomer who signs a contract that guarantees him $6,000 to show, and another $6,000 to win for his first fight, then $8,000 for his second fight and $10,000 for his third. If that fighter fights three times, wins all three fights and earns a $75,000 Knockout of the Night bonus in his third fight, his median pay per fight would only be $16,000. But his total pay for the three fights would be $123,000, for an average of $41,000 a fight.
For an example of an entry-level fighter who has cashed in big time with bonuses, look at Edson Barboza, who signed with the UFC in 2010 after having six pro fights in small regional promotions. Barboza’s “show money” is reportedly just $6,000 a fight. But Barboza has won all four of his fights, meaning he also got a $6,000 win bonus for all four fights, and Barboza has received three Fight of the Night bonuses and one Knockout of the Night bonus (including both Fight of the Night and Knockout of the Night on Saturday at UFC 142). Thanks to the UFC’s bonus-heavy pay structure, Barboza’s total take for his first four UFC fights is at least $348,000, even before any sponsorships or other sources of income.
Even without bonuses, entry-level fighters aren’t necessarily doing too badly. One such fighter is UFC featherweight Jim Hettes. Hettes was an unknown in MMA circles, fighting on the regional scene, until he caught a break in August and signed with the UFC on a deal that paid him $6,000 to show and $6,000 to win on his first fight, and then $8,000 to show and $8,000 to win on his second fight. Hettes won both fights, for a total take of $28,000, and is now looking like one of the brightest young prospects in the featherweight division.
For a 24-year-old like Hettes, making $28,000 in five months while fighting in the UFC, with a good chance of making a lot more than that in the future, is a dream come true. ESPN didn’t quote any active fighters complaining about their pay on the record and indicated that the inability to find such fighters was a sign that fighters were scared to speak out. But maybe the reality is most UFC fighters are OK with what they make.
In fact, when low-level fighters are released from the UFC because of losses they suffer in the Octagon, they almost universally express a desire to win enough fights in other promotions to earn the right to return to the UFC — which strongly suggests that they don’t view the contracts they’ve just been released from as onerous.
The handful of mid-level fighters who have been released from the UFC for reasons having to do with issues outside the Octagon (fighters like Jon Fitch, Nate Marquardt and Miguel Torres) also generally apologize for their transgressions and ask to return to the UFC. Again, that suggests that the contracts they were released from were better than the contracts they could earn in other promotions.
And the few prominent fighters who have become free agents, like Tito Ortiz, have generally decided when the dust settled that the grass was greener inside the Octagon than out of it. UFC Hall of Famer Ken Shamrock appeared in the Outside the Lines report, and it may not have been clear to viewers who aren’t MMA fans that Shamrock made millions of dollars in the UFC, or that Shamrock left the promotion because he wasn’t good enough to win inside the Octagon anymore, not because he objected to the terms of his contract. That was clarified, however, in the panel discussion that took place after Barr’s taped Outside the Lines report.
It is true that a handful of well-known fighters have been able to leave the UFC and make more money elsewhere. That includes former heavyweight champions Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia, who both left the UFC to sign with Affliction in 2008. But Affliction fell apart after putting on just two fight cards, which suggests that its higher-paying business model didn’t work.
ESPN’s report would have been strengthened by addressing other promotions’ business models, including not only Affliction but also Bellator and other smaller American MMA organizations. The UFC is by far the biggest MMA promotion and therefore deserves to have by far the greatest scrutiny, but a comparison of the UFC’s pay scale with other promotions’ pay scales would have provided some valuable context.
Ultimately, as former UFC heavyweight champion Ricco Rodriguez said on Outside the Lines, “The UFC gives you the best opportunity.” It would be great to see more opportunities for more fighters, but at the moment, even if UFC pay is lacking, it beats the alternatives in MMA.
Anthony “Rumble” Johnson misses weight by over 11 pounds due to “medical reasons” a.k.a. dehyration. A doctor administered fluids after Johnson fell ill about 3 hours before weigh-ins: Read here. Anderson Silva‘s mounting injuries leave.
Anthony “Rumble” Johnson misses weight by over 11 pounds due to “medical reasons” a.k.a. dehyration. A doctor administered fluids after Johnson fell ill about 3 hours before weigh-ins: Read here.
Anderson Silva‘s mounting injuries leave his return to the cage undetermined. Is a Middleweight Interim-Title fight necessary?: Read here.
Nate Marquardt requests release from BAMMA contract; is a free agent: Read here.
UFC to release unedited version of Lorenzo Fertitta‘s interview from ESPN:60 segment on questioning the promotion as a possible monopoly of the MMA sport: Read here.
Junior dos Santos looking to defend his title against Alistair Overeem in June: Read here.
Snooki‘s dad bought a boxing promotion which [of course] qualifies her as a new boxing promoter. Read here.
More hot MMA girls taking pics of themselves below:
Fighters from now on will be screened for performance-enhancing drugs prior to signing with the UFC or Strikeforce, Zuffa announced Tuesday.
UFC President Dana White promised before ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported on fighter pay that the UFC would release a video of Lorenzo Fertitta’s full, uncut interview with ESPN. But what the UFC actually posted online on Monday was something more than that — it was a full-on rebuttal of the Outside the Lines report that featured not only Fertitta’s comments but also comments from White and some of the UFC’s fighters.
Sunday morning marked the airing of an Outside the Lines segment on ESPN that was denounced by 
