MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - A UFC Union Will NEVER Happen

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Luke Thomas breaks down Ariel Helwani's interview with Tim Kennedy and discusses why the MMAAA failed. What is the best solution for fixing fighter pay? Morning Kombat’ is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Bullhorn and wherever else you listen to podcasts.    For more Combat Sports coverage subscribe here: youtube.com/MorningKombat   Follow our hosts on Twitter: @BCampbellCBS, @lthomasnews, @MorningKombat    For Morning Kombat gear visit:morning kombat.store   Follow our hosts on Instagram: @BrianCampbell, @lukethomasnews, @MorningKombat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Folks, I might be having a change of heart. I don't know. There's a lot to get to here. Hi everyone, Luke Thomas, one half of Morning Combat. Wanted to talk to you today about something really interesting that I just had to make a comment about. Now, this is Thursday as I record this video, June 9th, 2022. I'm talking about yesterday, Wednesday, June 9th, 2022. I'm talking about yesterday, Wednesday, June 8th, 2022. And on that day, former UFC middleweight and strike force fighter, Tim Kennedy was on the MMA hour with Ariel Helwani. Now they got to a whole lot of stuff, strongly encourage you to either watch

or listen to the interview. But the part that I wanted to focus in on for today's video was their discussion about a moment in time where Tim Kennedy and Cain Velasquez and George St. Pierre and T.J. Dillashaw and Donald Cerrone and potentially some other ones as well, those were the big names involved in the project, they were involved in what was called the double M triple A, or at least that's what I called it, but the Mixed Martial Arts Athletes Association.

Not a very great name for a union or an association, but in either case, that's what it was called. And it had some big guns, certainly in its early heyday. But the reason why I wanted to point it out to you about what he said was it's extremely important. Namely, Ariel asked him, basically, why did the double M triple A fail? What was the real source of it? And there was a few things complicating the effort. Over time, there was not enough that had happened, and I think some of the original figures like TJ Dillashaw had become disillusioned. Also, there is some evidence to suggest that between Cerrone and Dillashaw, that after their public display of support for the double MAAA, that the UFC had actually increased their purses between fights as a way to probably compensate them or to perhaps persuade them to not pursue these efforts anymore,

or perhaps they were feeling generous. But the point being is that's actually not the reason why it ultimately collapsed. In fact, what Tim Kennedy said is, and you can go and read his quotes, and again, you can see the interview for yourself, but here's the gist. The gist was they thought they had to make a big splash with some big names, mission accomplished, and then they were going to go to gyms piece by piece to get these guys to sign up because you don't need the full roster to do it. You actually need a pretty small proportion to do it, but that proved extremely challenging. In fact, what he said and the part to me that stands out as the most interesting, was that, and this is why it's basically, to me, almost worst case scenario. What he says is, they did not go to gyms and encounter what I would call ideological resistance.

In other words, they didn't go to a gym and say, hey, we would like to talk to you about the benefits of unionization or forming an association, which is a little bit similar but different. For the purposes of this conversation, we'll say unionization. It wasn't like they encountered a lot of folks who were saying, I don't see the benefit here. This would not serve my interests. I don't know what I would get out of this. In fact, what he says is that there was actually a strong amount of ideological support. Most of the fighters that they encountered believed that that thing, should it come to fruition in some kind of theoretical sense, would be beneficial for them. They heard the pitch and they understood and accepted the potential value of that. But here's the problem, and this is why I call it worst case scenario.

What they encountered was not ideological resistance. What they encountered was fear. What they encountered was an inability for the fighters in any kind of reasonable proportion to agree to put their names on the list of folks, and you get a sufficient number of those in the 30% range, and you can actually move forward that process. What they encountered were folks saying, I don't trust that there won't be retribution

for me putting my name on this list. Now, of course, that voting process is confidential. In fact, there would be no real way for the UFC to get access to that. Of course, that has been explained numerous times. Didn't matter. Didn't matter at all. What they encountered was folks who might have been ideologically sympathetic, but in reality could not move with them, could not pull that trigger, could not put their name on that list.

And here's why I call that worst case scenario, because you might be inclined to believe that someone believing the opposite of the value of unions or associations would be the biggest impediment. But I don't agree, because you can persuade people to do something like that. You can actually persuade people over time with real lobbying efforts. And when I mean lobbying, I don't mean members of Congress, but I mean going gym to gym, fighter to fighter, coach to coach, having these opportunities to explain to them. And again, it's not somebody

like me talking to fighters. It was other fighters talking to fighters. And it wasn't just other fighters. It was very celebrated public figures inside of that fighting space. In those scenarios, there is actually a lot of reason to believe while you might encounter some ideological resistance, there's a lot of evidence that shows, and frankly, unions and associations are built on the back of this, convincing people over time through a passionate outreach effort to believe in those values and then ultimately to then put forward an effort to encourage sign-ups.

To me, it's much worse that they found people who were sympathetic but simply far too timid to do anything about it. Because yes, you might think, well, if you can convince someone to change their opinion on something, surely you can get someone who's already sympathetic to sign their name on the dotted line. But it's actually a much more difficult thing. I mean, just think about the resistance there. We're already in agreement, but the person who I'm trying to get to sign is so frozen in the moment that they can't.

I'd actually argue you have a better chance of convincing a crowd that, say, was 50-50 on your proposition, convincing just enough of them to get over the hump, whatever that may be, rather than trying to convince people who were already in your camp, ideologically speaking, and you can't get them to move a muscle. You can't get them to budge an inch. In fact, what he said was out of a roster of 500 people, they got maybe 5% of them to sign up, you know, six or seven times the undercount of what they would need.

Folks, I got to tell you, that tells you everything you need to know about what's probably going to happen in the future. Listen, it wasn't just the double M, triple A. There were other associations and or union efforts to move this along. You guys remember Jeff Boris around the same time in 2016 tried something called the Professional Fighters Association. They haven't tweeted since 2017. I don't think. I looked at their Twitter account today. And of course, we all know famously Project Spearhead. In all three cases, which by the way, come from different directions,

double MAAA, yes, it had Bjorn Rebney, who had something of a fraught relationship with the MMA industry and the MMA fan base. But remember, he's standing next to St. Pierre. He's standing next to Velasquez. He's standing next to Cerrone and Dillashaw. And then, of course, Tim Kennedy. He actually had some real support. There was someone bankrolling it along the way. There was something to this.

And again, with Project Spearhead, you had Leslie Smith and you had Ally Quinta and some other ones as well trying to push that effort. So you had, in the case of Jeff Boris with the Professional Fighters Association, the PFA, he was part of the litigation team for the Ballingy Group, which at the time was representing Nate Diaz. They saw these contracts and they're like, this can't be real. So they then tried to get a unionization effort going. Project Spearhead tried to get a unionization effort going. Double M AAA tried to get a unionization effort going. And in all three cases, they encountered the exact same thing. Hey guys, we like your message. In theory, it sounds

great if something like that were to ever happen, but we don't trust the process by which this has taken place, by which this will take place, and we fear retribution. Now, you can say that that's Tim Kennedy's version of things. You can say that that fear that those fighters might have had may have been irrational given some of the safety and privacy protections that were in place. But it doesn't matter. In the end, you have three different groups of three different people, three different kinds of groups with three different kinds of people, and all of them faced the exact same stumbling block. The fighters might agree, but they're not going to sign. There might be more to the story there, because if it's not an ideological component that's really holding them back, might there be other things?

And folks have pointed out an industry where people are hyper-focused on themselves, and you'll hear even MMA fighters say you have to be very selfish in this industry. You have to put your needs sometimes in front of your families to get to the professional goals that you want. Or certainly you can put strain on friendships and, again, familial relationships and many other things. It has to be intensely inward-focused and intensely selfish. And so if you're in an industry like that, why would you necessarily want to sign up to protect someone else's interests, particularly if you're far ahead of them?

Why do you care what the UFC minimum is if you're far advanced past that, perhaps even getting pay-per-view points? There's probably something to be said for that. But again, when these fighters, when these groups went to these camps and talked to these fighters, that was actually not the real big issue.

That was not the part. So you can say that played a role, probably did on some level, but more to the point, it is the industry, or at least I should say, the perceived industry control by the UFC and its various powers of perceived retribution that kept them from signing. Now I started this video by saying I have had a change of heart. I actually still believe in the concept of a sports athletes union. We are seeing unions now having something of a resurgence in the United States, both in media newsrooms. You're probably seeing headlines around Starbucks and Amazon. I believe in the value of unions. I believe in

their power. I believe in how important they can be for the labor force and for the larger market itself. But if that solution isn't accessible despite repeated efforts from folks who have made good faith, full-throated, genuine efforts, people who would have the very best chances of getting their peers, right, fighter to fighter, to sign off, have had not just poor results, cataclysmically poor results. If that's the case, you might think to say, well, unionization is impossible. Right, it might be. But that doesn't mean that people are going to stop trying to remedy what they perceive as an imbalance in the industry.

Which brings us back to the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act getting extended to MMA. I hear from all the folks out there that what they don't want is a situation where MMA turns into the infrastructure, or I should say the architecture rather, of boxing. We don't want four sanctioning bodies. We don't want all these crazy titles. We don't want this fragmented space where sometimes the big fights that need to get made, it's hard to do because one person's on DAZN, one person's on Showtime, one person's on ESPN, all separate promoters, all being tied to networks. And I understand those concerns. Frankly, I share them. I have long been a proponent of the idea that I think on balance it actually might be better to have a union or to have an association. There are criticisms of that view in terms of how much money could actually be raised that way.

But you would have to imagine through a collective bargaining agreement a lot of remedies could be placed inside the industry that don't currently exist. A lot of protections could be placed. So I'm with you. In many ways I might would rather keep the way MMA works, just make sure the fighters make a little bit more and they have some healthcare protections and all the various things that a CBA would account for. But if the fighters are so petrified of perceived retaliation or retribution, that won't be on the table.

But the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, or for short, the Ali Act, you only need a handful of people to really do something like that. And the MMAFA has been doing exactly that. You got John Fitch, Randy Couture, Vinicius Quiraz, Carlos Newton, and a handful of others, all lobbying on the Hill,

trying to get this legislation advanced. They have bipartisan support, at least they did for the last, or two sessions ago of Congress. You need a much smaller group to affect much broader change. You don't need the vast signups of fighters to get there. And it would have a lot of the remedies to fix the current situation built in to that.

Now, of course, that would create potentially, potentially, a series of other problems. But folks, I'm trying to ask here, what is the way in which we can actually get fighters protection in the industry? The lawsuit, hard to know what's going to happen there. Certainly something could happen there, but it remains very much unclear. The other one would be unionization, which we

have seen now a series of very good, at least on paper, efforts utterly collapse in short order. And then there's the Ali Act. If you don't want, and there are any fighter watching this, doesn't want the Ali Act to ultimately change the industry, which by itself is debatable. There could be more good things about it than folks recognize. But of course, there's going to be a series of trade-offs in either direction. But if you don't want that, but yet they also won't sign up for a union, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you.

I really don't. There is nothing to tell you. It will either be one of those three. The lawsuit could potentially do something, but again, very much speculative, very much in the not near term. Unionization could potentially be done almost in a matter of months if there was enough institutional support for it among the fighters, but clearly that isn't on the table. And so that leaves us with the Ali Act. It leaves us with what would be a profound change to the industry,

but frankly the only truly accessible potential remedy that exists. If you actually say that you're in favor of fighters getting more money, well then say out loud what that mechanism is. Is it the lawsuit? Fine. But that isn't going to be anything that serves anyone in the near term. Is it unionization? Fine. I think it's a great idea. But that is definitely not something that is going to happen in the near term,

if ever, given what Tim Kennedy was saying. And then that just leaves you with this one, which, by the way, certainly they've not gotten the Ali Act to be voted on on both chambers of Congress, then sent to the president's desk. If it was, it's hard to know how current President Biden would sign it,

or if not, with the previous President Trump, it was unclear exactly how that would go, even if it made it to his desk. None of these things are guarantees. But if you're asking what is the likeliest mechanism in the short to medium, potentially long run as well, but certainly what's the one that's most accessible, even with all of its hurdles getting through Congress, which is no easy task, it would be the Ali Act.

There's no traction for a union. And the lawsuit is deeply speculative if at all a remedy we'll have to see. But the Ali Act would actually fix a lot. I know what you're saying, it'd create more problems. Fine, let's have that debate. But you can't go out there and say, I want fighters to make more money if you are also unwilling to admit that the thing that you potentially, and I know I'm talking to a lot of MMA fans here who are seeing this, if you're against turning MMA into boxing, well, fine. But what is your solution? There is none.

It doesn't exist. That's why I've had a change of heart. I don't know that you can convince broad swaths of the fighter community to sign up for something that even they in large part recognizes in their interest. I think if you're going to do it, you have to get a small group of folks who can focus in on a legislative solution and work towards that. Because short of that, what is going to make fighter pay go up? Nothing. The UFC is a business that's going to run their business above board, and it's going to run it in their interests. So unless your whole

concept of getting fighter pay to increase is simply generosity, mercy, their magnanimity, then you don't have a plan. There is no plan. You can't actually say you're in favor of increasing fighter pay if your answer is maybe Bitcoin will go up when they get these crypto awards that the fans vote on after fights. Yeah, maybe that will affect a very small amount in a positive direction. Great. What's that got to do with the vast majority of fighters who will never sniff any of those benefits? What is something that you to do with the vast majority of fighters who will never sniff any of those benefits? What is something that you could do in the industry that would affect them at scale that would get them from the top to the bottom? Somebody would get a benefit all the way through or at a bare minimum even with the Ali Act you can agree

It would potentially benefit much more the folks at the top than at the bottom But it would be some kind of remedy even those who may not be able to access all of it, the ones who would, would have significantly more protections than relative to the status quo. So I'm going to tell you folks, I'm not going to say unions can't work in MMA, but I'm going to say in my lifetime, in the course of my time covering the sport, the evidence is in, at least for right now, they're not going to work because the fighters either don't want to put their names on the list for fear of retribution. And of course, some of them might also just not believe in the value,

but really that's not what's holding it up. What's holding it up is a perceived control of the industry that fighters simply believe would be too costly for them to challenge. And so without the power of the law to compel the UFC, what is your answer for improving fighter pay? Would love to hear it. Would love to hear it. You can be against MMA turning into boxing, but you can't be against that and then also claim that you support fighter pay. You can't. It doesn't work. That is the best possibility.

That is the best possible choice, given the available options. And frankly, over time, it might prove to be the only one. If you're seeing this right now, just realize unionization in mixed martial arts is a pipe dream, and so we have to move on to other things to get fighters paid, including the perhaps controversial idea that the best way to do that, given the reality of things, is just turning MMA into boxing.