Fightmania Mailbag: Fighter Pay, Weight Cutting

There were two big issues that arose recently that I never found the proper opportunity to address. However, our readers have seen fit to provide me with the perfect excuse to remedy the situation in the form of our long-absent Fightmania Mailbag! Let’s not waste any time, because I’ve got a lot to say today (I know, you’re shocked).

Jared from Missouri writes:

I’m interested to get your side on the whole fighter pay controversy. I saw the thing on ESPN and heard Dana White’s rant and I think I fall on the side of the fighters here. It’s not like the UFC can’t afford to pay more, right?

Now, this is a big issue to tackle, so let me first point out a few things that struck me about the whole fighter pay non-troversy. Yes, non-troversy. During my viewing of the ESPN piece, my reading of the accompanying article on their website, and my viewing of the videos that Dana White released, these things stood out to me:

–One of the big flaws of the ESPN piece is that they didn’t mention any arguments to the contrary of their thesis. Of course, the thesis was that “fighters make a small amount of money compared to what the UFC makes/is worth, and they aren’t happy but are scared to speak out.” However, there was no mention of anything that could be considered a counter-point, such as the fact that the exposure that the UFC provides to both big-name and no-name fighters leads to a huge increase in sponsorship money. Even before the UFC could afford to pay someone like Chuck Liddell a huge salary, he was making some serious bank on sponsorships. You can’t look at just a fighter’s UFC salary when determining their income from the sport as a whole.

–Along those lines, why was there no mention of the exposure that the UFC gives these fighters? Isn’t that worth something? You get to coach on The Ultimate Fighter and suddenly, hundreds of thousands of people (or more) who didn’t previously know who you were are familiar with you. This, in turn, leads to more of those coveted sponsorship opportunities, as well as chances to make money on appearances, doing seminars, or even opening your own gym one day (the UFC-released video touched upon this nicely).

–I thought that Lorenzo Fertitta’s counter-point that ESPN sometimes pays boxers less than $300 to fight on an ESPN-televised card was a great point. However, it may be a bit misleading to point that out after pointing out that ESPN makes billions of dollars per year. Sure, they make billions of dollars per year, but how much do they make off of that particular boxing card? That’s what’s relevant. Bodog was a huge casino company, but Bodog Fights was not a profitable promotion. Did they owe fighters a share of their casino revenue, even though the MMA events they put on weren’t profitable? If Fertitta was arguing that ESPN should pay a decent salary even if that means they will lose money on their boxing events, that’s an interesting point, and the UFC has done that in the past, so it wouldn’t exactly be a hypocritical one.

–It’s not even close to fair to manipulate viewers who know very little about the sport of MMA by comparing the pay of preliminary card fighters in the UFC to league minimum salaries in the NBA, NFL or MLB. That’s not even comparing apples to oranges, that’s more like apples to Snickers. We’re talking completely different business models here, and you’re also talking about sports leagues that have existed and flourished for decades or, in the case of Major League Baseball, for over a century.

–One other problem I had with the ESPN piece was regarding the anonymity of the fighters being surveyed and their fear of being black-balled for complaining about their pay. Now, I’m not going to say that a young fighter who has fought once on the prelims of a UFC on FX card can just go in the media and bitch about his pay and not have to worry about his job security. However, isn’t that true in all occupations? If your first act on the job is to start loudly complaining about how little you’re getting paid, would you last long in that position, no matter what type of work it is that you do? Would people not, at the bare minimum, say, “Hey new guy, you knew how much you’d be making, shut up and get to work”?

What we’ve seen in the past is that fighters can and do complain about their pay and continue to get fights in the UFC. It’s usually moderate to big names, but again, doesn’t that make sense? Is there any job in the world where you can complain about your pay before you’ve even accomplished anything on the job and expect to remain gainfully employed? If one of those boxers on an ESPN card started ranting and raving in the press about his $275 payday, would he be asked to fight again on the next card?

The argument that if a fighter was to complain, he would be disciplined is also a disingenuous one. I could say that if I did any number of things, something terrible would happen to me, and you wouldn’t be able to convince me otherwise. Until I actually did the thing we’re talking about, there would be no proof one way or another that I was either right or wrong. If I said, “If I call Dana White a blowhard on Twitter, he’ll light a bag of poop on fire and put it on my porch,” how can I be proven wrong unless I actually call him a blowhard on Twitter? Since these fighters believe that they will be black-balled for speaking out, they won’t speak out, and therefore we can never know whether or not they’re right about being black-balled.

I will say this: if the UFC is concerned enough about their image that they will do an interview with ESPN in order to defend what they pay their fighters, do you really think they would black-ball a guy who gave an interview to ESPN about that same topic? If they’re going to do something that’s going to make them look that bad, then why would they do the interview in the first place and try to make themselves look good? What sense does that make?

Now, if you piss off the UFC by having boring fights, making rape van jokes on Twitter, refusing to fight certain opponents, failing drug tests, complaining in the media or doing any other number of annoying things, you will certainly face consequences. “Black-balled” may be pushing it, though. I think it’s more rational to think that you may not get the benefit of the doubt if you have a two or three-fight losing streak, or you may not get called to do The Ultimate Fighter, or you may have a harder time getting extra bonuses. However, that’s once again no different from how things work in all of our lives. Piss off the people that pay you, and they won’t give you preferential treatment. No surprise there.

Now, to speak directly to your point, should the UFC pay its fighters more? I don’t know that they should. Do the fighters complain about their pay sometimes? Of course they do. Here’s something to do: go ask your friends and family members, or even strangers, whether they would like to make more at their jobs. Take it a step further and ask them whether they deserve to get paid more at their jobs. How many will really say no? So am I supposed to go, “ooooh” when ESPN finds a couple dozen fighters who say they’re underpaid? Don’t even get me started about interviewing agents who represent fighters. These guys make their living off getting a cut of the pay of their fighters. You expect them to say that fighters shouldn’t be paid more?

I would love to see fighters get paid more. And in recent years, we have. One thing people don’t acknowledge, however, is that Zuffa does more than they have to do. Would any aspiring MMA fighter really turn down an offer of $2,000 to fight on a UFC card? Would they pass up that opportunity because they wouldn’t make any real money in their first fight? No way. Before Zuffa took over Strikeforce, some fighters on the Strikeforce prelims were making about that much or a little more to fight. It’s not as if more people watch the Strikeforce preliminary bouts now than they did then, but look at the increase in pay they’ve gotten since Zuffa took over.

Look at the issue of expanded health insurance. Is it the most that Zuffa could do? No. But is it far, far more than the least they could do? Absolutely. What competitors in the industry are forcing them to raise fighter pay or expand medical coverage? None. It’s not as if fighters will go fight for Dream or Bellator if the UFC cuts pay by one-third or if they hadn’t expanded their medical insurance. The UFC, like it or not, is where you go to succeed at the highest level in MMA, and fighters would make sacrifices to fight there if they had to. Yet, Zuffa has continually improved pay and other benefits over the last several years without a union or a serious competitor to force their hand. That says a lot to me.

A.C. asks:

I think that weight cutting needs to go. If you ask me, that’s the biggest danger to the UFC. If a fighter dies, it’s more likely to be from cutting weight than from an actual fight. If everyone is 10-20 pounds heavier at the time of the fight anyway, why bother having them lose weight for the weigh ins?

That’s a good point, and one that I will echo here. I’m not sure that we’ll see a fighter death anytime soon due to weight cutting, although it’s still a somewhat fair point because college wrestlers have died cutting weight for wrestling meets. Still, my thinking is kind of like yours: what’s the point? If Anthony Johnson and Vitor Belfort are both between 205 and 210 on the day of the fight, why not just have them fight at light heavyweight?

First, let’s discuss Johnson’s epic weight cutting failure. Here’s a guy who had missed weight by several pounds before when fighting at a lighter weight class. You’d think the extra fifteen pounds would be enough to prevent further problems, but clearly that wasn’t the case. Apparently, he was at 187.5 when the on-site doctor refused to let him go any longer without fluids and made him re-hydrate.

The scary thing is that at the weigh-ins, Johnson looked ridiculously cut at 197 pounds. The idea that this guy used to cut to 170 is crazy when looking at his frame with 27 more pounds on it. Now, the possible health complications and risks related to weight cutting are well-documented. I’m not going to rant and rave over how unsafe the process is, because we’ve all heard that before.

I think besides the safety issues, you can look at two major problems with the current weigh-in procedure. One is that it can lead to sub-par performances by those who attempt to drop too much weight. The other is that the UFC itself is burdened when fighters aren’t able to make their weight. Title fights are nixed and the whole process is brought under scrutiny. The thing is that the UFC is quite happy, for whatever reason, with the current procedure and doesn’t want to change it. For that reason, they aren’t pleased when someone like Johnson attracts attention to what a farce the weight cutting process is, since they’re comfortable with keeping it as-is.

Here you’ve got divisions full of guys that naturally weigh in the weight range of the division above them, but fight at the division below with the understanding (wink wink, nudge nudge) that none of them are really ever at that weight, save for a couple of hours around the time of weigh-ins. Frankie Edgar, for instance, may be the only real lightweight in the lightweight class. Johnson isn’t the only light heavyweight fighting at middleweight; he’s just the only one that weighed in as one, too. His opponent, Vitor Belfort, was well over 200 pounds come fight time, as well. Why not have those guys fighting at light heavyweight?

Many (including myself) find that a really fascinating piece of information is missing from the otherwise-useless “tale of the tape” that the UFC provides: the fighter’s weight just before the fight. Why can’t we have that information? Because the UFC doesn’t want everyone to recognize what a farce the weigh-ins are. The real question is, what difference does it make to the UFC?

Is there any real reason why fighters couldn’t simply weigh in right before a fight, or a couple of hours before? Vitor Belfort and Anthony Johnson would still have been able to fight one another; it just would have been a light heavyweight fight, instead. Make the heavyweight limit 230 pounds and add a super heavyweight class with no limit and voila! No more worries.

Will people still miss weight? Sure. But they already do now, right? Weigh them a few days before the fight, too, and make sure they’re within say, five pounds of their fight weight then, too. Will fighters still cut weight? Some will, but will perform so colossally poorly when dehydrated that soon before a fight that they won’t make that mistake twice.

Of course, none of this needs to happen. Since just about everyone cuts weight, no one is really put at a disadvantage by it, after all. But that understanding does prove that the whole thing is a charade. Really though, if the UFC isn’t going to change anything, they should stop with the righteous indignation whenever someone like Johnson doesn’t do their part to maintain appearances. Isn’t the weight that you fight at more important in determining the fairness of a bout than the weight the night before the fight?

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Tags: Anthony Johnson, Bellator, Dana White, fighter pay, non-troversies, UFC, weight cutting