MIA IN MMA
Athletes fighting for companies like UFC say they’re done taking a beating for meagre wages
People see Conor McGregor and think all UFC fighters live like that. No. He lives like that. John (Doomsday) Howard
As mixed martial arts has grown to rival many other sports in terms of sponsorship and audience reach, it falls short of compensating many of its athletes
John (Doomsday) Howard, who has a 23-12 record in his 13-year career of hitting guys until they cry mercy, rolls into an LA Fitness in the Boston suburbs.
He’s three hours late to his workout, but not because he slept in. It had snowed that morning, the schools started late, and he needed to drop off his three daughters. “I got kids, man,” Howard says. Many professional athletes might hire a nanny. But even as a competitor in mixed martial arts who’s fought around the world in a high-grossing, fast-growing sport, that’s not something Howard can afford.
After a quick trip to the sauna, Howard hits the machines: presses, lifts, pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups to catch a weighted ball, scrambling across the floor on all fours, standing on his hands until a dark stain spreads across the back of his hoodie, Snapchatting and bantering all the while with his workout mates, encouraging, teasing. Howard is compact, but he moves the fastest of the group, all bunched muscles above slender calves. About an hour and a half of this and then a round of laps in the pool.
“This is just to maintain,” Howard says after emerging from the locker-room to pick up a tall smoothie. He’s got a fight in three months and fight camp starts two months out. That’s the brutal part, he says — physically as well as psychologically, since it’s the time when he starts running out of money from his most recent fight in December.
His promoter, Ultimate Fighting Championship, is a financial powerhouse. Its chief executive, Lorenzo Fertitta, told CNN Money it would generate US$600 million in revenue for 2015, “a record for the company.” Pay-per-view is the biggest revenue source, he said, but media rights and sponsorships also add up.
As MMA has grown to nearly rival tennis or golf in the value of its sponsorships and the breadth of its audience, it has failed to develop a counterweight shared by most other professional sports: some form of collective organization, setting standards for athlete compensation and other rights.
Big-league baseball, hockey, football, basketball and soccer all have unions. They also pay out a much higher percentage of their revenue in player salaries than MMA promoters do.
Even the lowest-paid players on their rosters — in Major League Soccer, salaries start around US$50,000 a year — have their training, game travel and medical insurance covered, and they enjoy such perks as per diem food allowances, a share of tournament winnings, retirement accounts, paid vacation and workers’ compensation if they’re injured on the job.
Not so for your everyday MMA fight, like the one Howard fought in December.
“I got paid 25 grand,” Howard said after heading to a nearby barbecue joint, where he sucks down ice water but doesn’t eat — it’s time to start cutting weight — sitting next to his manager and workout buddy Jonathan Sneider. “I had to give him two (thousand). I had to give the gym 10 per cent, another management crew 10 per cent. So after that, the only money I see that’s actually mine? Maybe 12 grand. And then I have to pay all those bills — rent, cars, fix that, fix this.”
At the beginning of the year, even that meagre, occasional income almost disappeared.
The email came after Howard lost the December fight. The UFC was dropping what had been a contract for four fights, leaving him scrambling to find another promoter. Signing with a smaller outfit, the World Series of Fighting, was a huge relief.
“Great, I can plan my life,” Howard says, throwing up his hands. Unlike superstars such as Conor McGregor — who rocked the MMA world when he announced his retirement last week and then retracted it — Howard doesn’t have the luxury of walking away from the modest career he’s built. Meanwhile, he’s got side hustles: a training gig here, an event appearance there, sometimes even working night events with a balloon company to make extra cash.
“People see Conor McGregor and think all UFC fighters live like that,” Howard says. “No. He lives like that.”
“If I went back in time and talked to myself, I would say, ‘Stay an electrician. You’ll make more money,’” Howard, 33, says. “I’m a UFC fighter who has fought all over the world, and I’m still living like the average Joe.”
That same rancour has bubbled up among the ranks of fighters on whose names and images millions of dollars are made. Some are talking about creating an organization that can advocate for fighters, pay their legal bills and negotiate with promoters over salaries and benefits.
Fighters have found a lawmaker — a U.S. representative from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, who spent some time in the ring himself — to back legislation that would subject MMA to the same rules that were instituted for boxing 16 years ago, giving fighters more leverage in their negotiations with the corporations running the show.
The UFC, which estimates as many as 40 million people watch its biggest matches on pay-perview, has about 525 fighters under contract. Bellator has about 120 fighters and says it’s seeing similar viewership numbers.
Fighters are under contract to promoters and usually don’t have much power to negotiate the terms of their employment. Rather than a system of seeds and brackets, matches are made by the promoter in a closed-door process that has a lot to do with fighters’ mass-market appeal.
“Our clearest position on that is we put on fair and competitive matches that we believe fans want to see,” UFC spokeswoman Isabelle McLemore says.
She says independent rankings factor into the matchups, but decisions are subjective and opaque — as are the times when fighters are cut entirely, and what goes into how much fighters are paid. For example, Howard says he doesn’t know how cheated to feel about his salary relative to the proceeds from the web video, pay-per-view, and other things he’s required to do.
“How do I track this piece of paper?” Howard says of his fight paycheques. “How much money did you make off my name?”
Sports such as baseball, football and basketball have monopolistic leagues with no trouble attracting talent — but also unions to extract a chunk of the sport’s revenue for players.
But team players usually are employees of their club, while fighters are independent contractors and thus barred from unionizing. However, even individual sports such as tennis and golf have formed players associations that have improved conditions for their professional members — setting up pension systems, standardizing rankings and rules of play.
That’s the thinking behind the MMA Fighters Association, which was set up by a Phoenix lawyer named Rob Maysey in 2006. The group aims to fund itself through group licensing revenue and provide some collective benefits, including litigation support and financial planning. It also sets its sights on a more far-reaching goal: legislation in the U.S. Congress that would protect all MMA fighters.
“Our overall goal is not to change the classification from contractor to employee,” Maysey says. “It’s to bust up the stranglehold on the sport that one promoter has to allow these guys to move around to a whole bunch of different promotions. That will drive their market value.”
As the MMAFA sees it, the legislation already exists: for boxing. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act was passed in 2000 after a string of corruption scandals. It mandates a system of objective rankings to be administered by a third party, prohibits coercive provisions and establishes minimum standards for fighter contracts. It also requires promoters to disclose financial data about each bout.
Marc Edelman, a sports business law professor at the City University of New York, sees the comparison to boxing as apt.
“Given that the role that MMA serves in American society today is so similar to the role that the World Boxing Association served 10 or 15 years ago,” Edelman says, “it would seem prudent to expand the Ali act not only to MMA, but to other combat sports.”
Maysey says 300 current and former fighters back the legislation and they’ve enlisted the help of the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union. Their champion for the legislation is Mullin.
“These guys now, it’s what they’re doing year-round. They’re professional athletes,” he says. “They’ve made very little. They’re worn out. They’ve been beat in the head and there’s no career for them to move to, except go get a gym. And if you make one person mad in this sport — because there’s only one place to make any money, and it’s the UFC — then they could ruin your entire career.”
Mullin knows this won’t be easy: The UFC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists to keep such proposals from reaching the floor.
The UFC declined to comment about legislation that hasn’t been introduced. McLemore did say the company feels it is regulated enough by state boxing commissions, which created regulations as they legalized MMA over the past decade. But MMA still isn’t subject to all of the same rules as boxing, which Mullin’s bill would rectify.
I’m a UFC fighter who has fought all over the world, and I’m still living like the average Joe.
John (Doomsday) Howard ends his day in Somerville, Mass., where he spars at a storefront gym. That evening, it’s packed with young men and women, grappling on mats and pounding pads held by beefy guys. It smells like feet.
Howard puts on gloves. He looks strong, but so do the kids around him, dancing back and forth, peppering pads with sharp jabs, getting ready for competitions that could be their shot at a glorious career in MMA. For Howard, though, it’s a job. “I’m 33 — I realistically only have five to seven years left,” he says. “People don’t understand that I’m a real father. I got this job to provide for my kids. That’s it.”