So, tremendous lesson, right, in the Tito and Chuck disaster.
I guess you would call it a disaster.
I mean, what’s a big fight, right?
What’s a big fight?
Well, that's numbers.
That's purely numbers.
It doesn’t have to be a great fight and not all great fights are big fights, right?
It's one of those things where, could you build anticipation?
And it gets lost on so many people including people in the business of what promotion means.
What does—I've heard athletes say they are under-promoted and I will always challenge
them, “Okay, but tell me what that means?
I mean, your face wasn't on enough posters?
You weren't on enough billboards?
You didn't have countdown shows behind…?
I mean, tell me what that means to be under-promoted.”
And a lot of times that's where the wheels fall off the bus.
They don't know.
Look, promotion is only one thing.
It's storytelling.
That's it.
You have to find the story and then you have to be able to tell it, and then you have to
hope that that story resonates.
But promotion as a whole is a big experiment.
There is no recipe in that, right?
I've told you guys a hundred times but there's no college in the world that you can go major
in fight promotion.
There's no book in any library in the world that you could check out that will tell you
about fight promotion.
It's a big experiment and there are only a few guys alive that know how to do it, and
so much of this has been a commentary on Oscar De La Hoya in a negative way, which I'm not
sure is fair.
I don't know that I totally agree with that even though I find myself perpetuating that.
I find myself being a little bit hard here on Oscar.
Look, Oscar is not passionate about mixed martial arts and that was very clear and very
obvious, and when it comes to storytelling and building anticipation you cannot just
set up a ring and the rest of it takes care of itself.
I've heard fighters threaten that they were going to leave a promotion and start their
own promotion.
It does—go ahead.
Go right ahead.
That's essentially what we saw here.
So Chuck and Tito come together, go to Oscar, pitch him on an idea that Oscar was never
passionate about, he was never behind, with a story that he simply did not know how to
tell.
It doesn’t make Oscar a bad promoter.
The lesson to be learned in this is you got to stay in your lane.
You just do.
Vince McMahon went into football.
Didn't work.
Vince McMahon went into bodybuilding.
It didn't work.
He goes in wrestling.
He can sell out any arena in the world any day of the week that he wants to.
But he's passionate about it, he understands it and he knows what he's doing.
So many people think it's easy, that you set up a ring and bring some cameras in.
It doesn’t work that way.
And you're starting to see all the pieces of the puzzle and, yeah, there's a little
bit of a knock on Oscar but he did jump into something that he didn't know what he was
doing.
I mean, he just didn’t understand that it's different.
It's a different market and we're spoiled, just by one example, but we're spoiled as
MMA fans.
We have been treated in both Bellator and the UFC from the beginning to five feature
matches.
Boxing goes what we call top-heavy, meaning they have one feature match, the main event.
Everything else is just to set up the cameras, to fill up the arena, for that one mega-match.
Oscar followed that recipe in some ways.
I don't know that he had a mega-match, but he'd still follow the recipe of going top-heavy.
Well, that's just not what an MMA fan wants.
There were many things that were wrong here, I'm just offering you one example that you
guys were able to see.
A lot of the things that didn't work here you guys won't be able to see.
That happens in the office, that happens with organizations, and it's just simply not something
that would resonate with you guys.
I would question, or at least I will respond to other people who have questioned, is the
same thing going to happen to Dana White?
Dana White’s saying he wants to go into boxing.
I would counter that by telling you, look, the biggest thing that Oscar missed, much
like Vince McMahon when he went into football—Vince McMahon is not passionate about football.
He is not an expert in football.
Oscar, not passionate, not expert in mixed martial arts.
Dana White’s true love—his first love, maybe it got beat out by mixed martial arts
somewhere along the way, but still his first love is boxing.
His son is currently, right now as we speak, a boxer.
So there is a passion there.
There is an understanding there by Dana.
I don't know that he'll stub his toe.
I don't know that he'll have overwhelming success.
I don't know what will happen, but it's not quite apples to apples.
It's not a guy getting out of his lane and going at something else.
You still do have that passion and you still do have that understanding, which is just
the one thing that Oscar didn't have.
I think that there was also maybe a much broader example that was presented to you guys.
You know, you're hearing about this class action lawsuit against the UFC and you're
now starting to see through this that it's not that simple to promote fights.
So many people think that it is.
It's not.
It's not that simple to have these distribution deals, to keep your thumb on top of everything,
to make sure you're organized.
Look, Golden Boy advertised and planned to do a Black Friday sale where you can get half
off of the pay-per-view, which was humiliating and embarrassing and unheard of.
But they kind of tipped their hat to, “Look, business isn't so great, so let's all pitch
in here together,” and then they had to run that back on Black Friday to put a big
announcement and say, “Look, we can't do that.
We didn't have…you know, contractually with our distribution partners, we're not authorized
to do this.”
Well, look, that's an organizational thing done in the office.
That's embarrassing, that's humiliating to not have checked that and done that ahead
of time, but that still speaks to the level of leadership that it's coming from.
So when you're hearing about some of these class actions and what’s the split, that
it's all on the fighters, you're starting to see, well, no it's not.
The fighters have a tremendous part of this, for sure, but so does the promoter, so does
the office, so does the organization, so does the event planner.
There is a tremendous partnership amongst those two and you can hash it out and discuss
it, “It should be a 50-50 split,” “It should be an 80-20 split,” “It should
be a straight contract,” kind of all these different arguments that you want to have,
but I think what you're starting to see a little bit clearer is that all of those arguments
are fair but when you do business you pick one model.
All of those models are fair, but so is the UFC’s.
It's been very fair from the beginning and you're starting to see the importance, and
you're starting to see how much you're all working together and if somebody’s asleep
at the wheel bus goes off the road.