Here is my take on the ESPN story and the whole fighter pay issue. To me, I represent fighters, so the more money they get paid, the merrier. I'm all for it, but at the same time, you have to keep things in perspective. First of all, on the topic itself, it's like television. If you don't like the channel, then get a remote and fucking change it. Don't sit around and bitch about a TV show that you don't want to watch when you have options. If you don't like the pay in the UFC and you don't think they are paying fair, then don't do it. Go do something else. Go box or do Jiu Jitsu tournaments or whatever. You can go and get a job at McDonald's or wherever, or go finish college. Just do whatever. To me, the way that it's being talked about is wrong.
Everybody bitches and I think people are just making too big a deal out of it. There is not a company you can't walk into where everyone, from a janitor to a vice president, thinks they are being underpaid and exploited. Here is the basic concept of promotion, you have to either sell tickets or you have to be a draw on pay-per-view or ratings. That's it! It's a simple formula. If you don't do any of those three, then your contribution to the company is zero. So imagine a janitor that doesn't want to clean and then he's like, "I don't think I'm being paid fairly." Well, it's like, "You don't clean. You don't do shit but come to work and sit all day and twiddle your thumbs." I'm not saying the undercard fighter is twiddling his thumbs, because he trains hard and everything else, but as far as his contribution to an overall revenue stream to a company, it's nonexistent. So it's within that company's right to set the amount of money that they feel like a fighter should be getting and that's the amount of money that they get due to their contribution. Let's take that for example. The UFC's starting pay is $6000 and $6000. I know fighters that are into their 30th fight that's never seen 6 and 6. They never made that much money to be at 6 and 6. I just signed a kid, Pat Schilling, who debuted on the FX card. He is a 145-pounder and his first fight was 6 and 6 and he's never seen 6 and 6. Go tell him he's being underpaid.
What people do is look at UFC's revenue stream and they say, "Well, this guy is being underpaid." That's the UFC's revenue stream. They're a company and they have a lot of responsibilities and liabilities and a lot of things that they do that's involved with fight promotion and running a company, so to just arbitrarily bitch about it without really understanding what's going on is just wrong. And then the whole concept of discretionary bonuses, they are a company. If they feel like rewarding you, they will reward you. If they don't, they don't. It happens in every corporation across the United States. They are called performance bonuses. If you are in the sales field and you sell more than you're supposed to, you get more money. If you fight hard or you fight well, you get more money. Not everybody can fight at that level in the same way. That's just how it is.
The thing is, a lot of people are comparing the UFC to other sports, like the NFL and NBA. The NFL's TV contract is like $3 billion a year between 3 networks, so look at the breakdown. The UFC just signed a deal with FOX that's worth $100 million a year. That's their TV deal. Add to it international distribution and this, that and the other, and it can't be much more than another $20 mill. So in total, the UFC is getting $120 million in TV deals. That's not counting pay-per-view, but pay-per-views is a whole different structure. What happens when the pay-per-view sucks and they only do 200,000 buys? They still have to pay. They don't go to the fighter and say, "Hey, the pay-per-view did a little less. We made south of our projections, so we're gonna deduct it from your paycheck." Pay-per-view is a whole different structure. That's a whole different animal. So let's look at the TV deal. That's a $120 million deal compared to a $3 billion deal. The UFC's largest attendance, at one show, they had 53,000 people. That's one show. The NFL, the average stadium size is 68,000 capacity, so every time they have a game, 68,000 people go to watch it. You count the ticket sales for that. Count the ticket sales for the VIP boxes. Count the revenue for each game that the stadium receives from people drinking $9 beers, eating $12 popcorn, and $8 hot dogs. You factor all of that in to the enormous sponsorship deals that goes into the NFL, plus the revenue that they receive from TV, and you're going to compare that to the UFC? If the UFC generated $4 billion a year in gross revenue, I guarantee you their fighters wouldn't be making 6 and 6. It's an unfair comparison.
You can't compare sports that's been around forever to a sport that's less than 20 years old. The reason we can do that is because everybody is just so accessible. They are on Twitter and here and there, so it's easy to get the word around, but if everybody sits down and thinks about this and go, "Wait a minute, this is not the same sport. Let's look at boxing," and then people start comparing it to boxing. They say, "Well, in boxing, a star athlete can make up to $25 million dollars." And that is true. So really, the people that should be bitching are the Anderson Silva's of the world and the Brock Lesnar's of the world. It shouldn't be the undercard guys because in boxing, if you are in a 4-rounder and you make a couple of grand, you are a lucky guy. You're not on national television; you're on some shit show in God knows where until you build yourself up.
Here is the thing with Ken Shamrock. Ken Shamrock is a bitter guy. He's just a bitter guy. When you fight on some shit show in South Africa against fuck knows who in fuck knows where, and you want to consider yourself a legend, you're just a bitter individual. He's just pissed. He never truly achieved the heights in mixed martial arts that he claims he has. What has he ever done? Did he win a tournament? No. He won a few super fights and that's it. But he's pissed that he goes down as a legend in the books as a guy who was juicing up a storm and now his body is looking down and he's broke and he can't make ends meet. That's what he's pissed at. So they go talk to him about it. And plus, when he fought, there was no money to be made anyway, so it doesn't matter. Go talk to a NFL player from the 1930's and ask him how he was getting paid compared to these guys today where the league minimum is $350,000. Go tell that to a guy from the 1940's. Ask them did they make money compared to what these guys are making in today's NFL. The money wasn't there to be made. Nobody asked Ken to fight here. He could have stayed in WWE and done whatever he was doing. Nobody asked him to fight and nobody is asking him to fight today. But how can you bitch about not making money in the UFC when you fought Tito Ortiz and had a pay-per-view split and made over a million dollars? Just because you pissed it all away doesn't mean anything. That would be like Evander Holyfield saying there is no money in boxing because he's broke. Well, you're broke because you blew it, not because you never made it.
You look at boxing and the average boxing card has a main event and 3 other swing bouts televised. The UFC does 8 to 10 fights. Well, if they scale that down and bring you to the boxing model, you will have one main fight and then you will have 2 guys fighting on the undercard. That's the savings of 8 fights. They can save on fighter output and pay the same kind of money, but then people will be bitching, saying they are paying $50 for only 3 fights, these guys are overpaid, this is ridiculous, and blah, blah, blah. And then you will have the fighters bitching because they can't get into the UFC. The problem is these guys feel they have nowhere else to go, so by default, they feel like they are getting screwed. But that's just simply not true. We just renegotiated Mo's contract and they are paying him more money than he would make anywhere else. We had nowhere else to go, but I don't feel like we got underpaid. He is making good money and they treated us well.
The true question comes in ancillary rights and the other rights that you give away in the UFC. That's the question that people should be talking about. You sign your rights of perpetuity away, which means for the rest of your life, your rights can never be given to anybody exclusively for the future. But once again, if you don't like it, don't sign the contract. It's their company; they can run it however they want to run it. At the end of the day, there is always somebody in charge and you're always gonna look at that person like, "They are getting more money than I am." The boxing pay-per-view model is totally different. When a boxing pay-per-view is put on, all of the promotion is done by the pay-per-view provider, so if it's HBO, then it's HBO and if it's Showtime, then it's Showtime. They do all of the promotion and all of the production. They pay for everything. The only thing the promoter really does is negotiates with the fighters and bring the fighters to the TV network. So for that, he makes 10%. They say, "Well, he has to pay fighters out of pocket." Yeah, he has to pay a certain amount of money, but it's not like he picks these people out of thin air. When you put a Mayweather fight together, you know you're gonna make money. You know you're going to get your X amount of pay-per-view buys and if you don't and you lose money, then that's the business you are in. The UFC has a huge overhead because they do all of the production and promotion. All the networks do is film it and put it on the air. It's a different motto and it's not replicated by any other sport in existence.