TORONTO — Ten days after a headline-grabbing conference call announcing the formation of the Mixed Martial Arts Athletes Association it remains unclear what exactly the organization is planning to do, and how they are planning to do it. But maybe that uncertainty is to their benefit, as throughout a cold fight week in Toronto leading up to Saturday night’s UFC 206, the MMAAA has remained at the forefront of discussion throughout the sport.
“The momentum from the press was key and important and strategic and appreciated,” said Tim Kennedy, a UFC middleweight who has been one of the driving forces behind the MMAAA. “But the response from the fighters is what I’m really cherishing and emboldened by. I could go through the UFC roster and it would be hard to pick out names that haven’t contacted us.”
Kennedy was one of five fighters — including Georges St-Pierre, T.J. Dillashaw, Donald Cerrone and Cain Valasquez — who took part in last week’s announcement and will form the MMAAA’s board. He’s fighting Saturday at UFC 206 and claims every single fighter on the card has approached him about getting involved with the association.
“It’s exciting. People are having a realization that fighters are going to be taken care of,” Kennedy said. “A legacy that would be significant to me is knowing that the athletes following me and that preceded me aren’t going to die poor and in comas.”
The association’s desires are fairly straightforward: a larger share of UFC profits, better health coverage for current and former fighters, and a pension plan for retiring athletes. While fighters have been after these accommodations for years, it seems that recent game-changing events in the MMA world have spurred athletes to take action.
First, the UFC put in place a vast anti-doping program run by USADA, which requires athletes to work closely with testing agents on a daily basis despite not technically being year-round employees. Then, the UFC was sold to a group led by WME-IMG, a colossal talent agency, for $4.2 billion, making it the largest acquisition in professional sports history. Shortly after that, the promotion held UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, a culmination of years of expensive lobbying to lift the state of New York’s ban on mixed martial arts. The event attracted a sold-out crowd of 20,427, and generated a gate of $17.7 million, which set a Madison Square Garden record.
“This is a grown up sport now,” Kennedy said. “This isn’t promoters talking crap about athletes. This isn’t guys not being able to feed their families. This isn’t guys making 20 grand to go into the octagon and get their brains beat in in front of a sold-out arena. We broke every record in Madison Square Garden history in the most marquee sporting place on the planet. And we have guys making 20 grand to fight. That has to change.”
The MMAAA claims that UFC fighters currently receive only eight per cent of UFC revenue. That percentage is probably more estimate than fact. Wages vary from fighter to fighter and the UFC has also been known to award undisclosed discretionary bonuses, so it’s extremely difficult to get a sense of exactly how big—or rather, small—the fighters’ slice of the pie is. But what most agree on is that UFC fighters receive far less of their sport’s revenue than athletes do in the big four North American professional sports.
Fighters also get injured at an exceptionally higher rate than athletes in other sports, an inevitable byproduct of MMA’s brutal physicality. But since UFC fighters are essentially independent contractors rather than full-time employees — earning wages on a fight-to-fight basis — if an athlete isn’t healthy enough to compete, the athlete doesn’t get paid.
“In fighting, every training session’s a potential injury,” says Misha Cirkunov, a light-heavyweight from Toronto who will fight Saturday night at UFC 206. “There’s a lot of injuries. And a lot of guys go into fights with injuries. That’s what a lot of people don’t know. In this game, you’re never really 100 per cent. But you have to fight to get paid.”
An increase in wages would be especially beneficial for Canadian fighters like Cirkunov, who pay taxes on each side of the border when they fight in the United States. According to several current UFCers, a basic contract for an undercard fighter getting his start in the UFC could pay out $20,000 per fight. Taxes will quickly eliminate anywhere from 20-40 per cent of that. Then you have to give out 10 per cent cuts to your corner man and manager, as well as any other people who have helped you along the way, whether it’s a nutritionist, a jiu-jitsu coach or a massage therapist.
“And say you get two teeth knocked out. That happened to me. To fix each one is two thousand dollars. That’s four grand coming out of your pay,” Cirkunov said. “You win a fight and lot of people think, oh, he just got 20 grand. But the reality is, once you get home and once you set up your table to eat with your family, you’re looking at maybe six thousand dollars if you’re lucky.”
These issues are important and it’s clear that the UFC should be doing everything it can to take better care of its fighters. The future of the sport depends on athletes believing they can not only make a livable wage but also be afforded the health care benefits they will almost certainly need after a career spent receiving massive physical trauma. But one topic that is perhaps overshadowing what the MMAAA is trying to accomplish is the involvement of the extremely polarizing Bjorn Rebney as an advisor to the organization.
The former Bellator boss carries a dubious reputation in the sport for being less-than-kind to the fighters under his employ. Just ask Eddie Alvarez, the former Bellator star who was sued by the company when he tried to jump to the UFC. You could also ask UFC President Dana White — a man that, it should be noted, has obvious interest in keeping the MMAAA as marginalized as possible — who recently called Rebney “the biggest scumbag in the history of combat sports.”
Cerrone, one of the five fighters to participate in the MMAAA announcement, softened his stance on the association in the days after, primarily due to Rebney’s involvement.
“I didn’t know Bjorn was part of this whole thing,” Cerrone said, adding that he found out about Rebney’s involvement when he arrived for the announcement. “I don’t know him personally, I’ve never dealt with him personally. I just know he’s done a lot of bad to a lot of fighters.”
So, it seems like that’s going to be an issue. Nevertheless, Cerrone also said he was still committed to the MMAAA and, on a larger scale, finding a way to improve the lives of fighters like himself.
“I’ve probably got three or four years left in this sport, so my main concern is what’s after. Health care? Some kind of pension? Some kind of retirement? Those are the things I’m searching for. These are the things that I need,” Cerrone said. “I strongly believe in that.”
Four of the five fighters who took part in the announcement have impending fights on their calendars but Kennedy says that in the new year the MMAAA would begin taking action. Again, it’s entirely unclear what form that action will take and MMAAA organizers say they have nothing to gain from sharing their strategy publicly and giving the UFC time to counteract what they’re doing. But Kennedy repeatedly vowed that big things were coming.
“This isn’t a handful of guys suing someone. It’s us changing the way that athletes are taken care of,” Kennedy said. “This is about reshaping the sport.”