The UFC had a pretty successful event on Saturday, April 21 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, N.J. Kevin Lee brutalized Edson Barboza in the lightweight main event to get himself back in the title hunt. And in the co-main event of UFC Fight Night 128, New Jersey native Frankie Edgar bounced back from a recent knockout loss with a unanimous decision victory over Cub Swanson. Behind the scenes during fight week, things did not get nearly as well for the promotion.
Things started to go awry during the Friday morning weigh-in. One of the first bits of news to come out of that event was that the flyweight bout between Ulka Sasaki and Mahomed Bibulatov was scratched. The reason the UFC pulled the fight from the card was a back injury suffered by Bibulatov. The contest was canceled before either fighter weighed in.
The UFC has no set rule on paying fighters when it scratches matchups during fight week. The usual procedure is that the fighter who caused the fight to be removed from the card, in this case, Bibulatov, goes home empty-handed. The fighter who was ready and able to fight his contracted opponent can face several different scenarios.
When two fights were pulled from UFC 223 after a couple of combatants suffered injuries when Conor McGregor allegedly threw a hand dolly at a bus that was transporting fighters from a pre-fight media event, those individuals received their full show money according to UFC President Dana White. None of those fighters had weighed in for the event when that decision was made.
Sasaki,
according to Ariel Helwani, was paid less than half of his show money. Helwani wrote that he was paid $10,000 of his contracted $21,000 show money.
The UFC needs to be consistent in these matters. If a fighter makes it to fight week and is ready, willing and able to fight their contracted opponent, then they should be paid, at the very least, their show money. If the promotion wants to make that fighter weigh-in to earn that payday, then fine, make them do that. I’d argue that fighters in these situations should receive both their show and win money. After all, that amount is already contracted and accounted for by the promotion.
One thing that’s not acceptable is to have fighters – contracted fighters – worrying if or how much they will be paid. The promotion wants to be taken seriously, yet it does these petty things that make it look small at best and vindictive at worst.
Speaking of vindictive – that brings us to Leslie Smith.
Smith was scheduled to face Aspen Ladd in a bantamweight bout, but when her opponent came in nearly two pounds heavy, Smith figured she would see if she could strike a new deal with the UFC.
“I wanted to extend. First I was like, okay, we’ll extend it at $100,000 flat,” Smith told
MMAjunkie. “Two fights at $100,000 flat and they were like ‘no.’ Then I put out another offer. I was like okay, we’ll keep the same terms then, but I’d like this fight. They said no still. They elected to pay me my show as well as my win business so that this will count as the last fight on my contract.”
Smith is one of the major players behind Project Spearhead, an effort to move MMA fighters toward a union. One of the first goals of Project Spearhead is to get 30 percent of the UFC roster to sign authorization cards that will then be submitted to the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB will then decide if UFC fighters should be considered independent contractors, which they currently are, or employees.
By all appearances, the UFC paid Smith, who was ranked in the top 10 before she was released, to go away and thus hurt the chances for Project Spearhead’s success. Smith is listed as the interim president of Project Spearhead. Two fighters who are still on the UFC roster, Kajan Johnson and Al Iaquinta, are the other interim members of the board.
The third misstep the UFC made during UFC Fight Night 128's fight week was booking former NFL player Greg Hardy for a Dana White Contender Series card.
MMA Today first broke the news that Hardy, who is 3-0 as an amateur, would compete on an event on June 12.
Hardy’s history is sordid.
He was convicted of assaulting an ex-girlfriend in 2014. Those charges were later dropped after the alleged victim refused to testify when Hardy appealed his conviction. He was suspended for 10 games (later reduced to four) for conduct detrimental to the NFL. The suspension came after a league investigation into Hardy’s alleged domestic violence. The domestic violence charges were expunged from Hardy's record in 2015. In 2016, Hardy was arrested for felony possession of a controlled substance.
Hardy fighting under the UFC banner sends a terrible message. That message is that the potential to make money trumps anything for the UFC.
The UFC made some big mistakes this past weekend and when UFC president Dana White holds his next press conference he should be forced to answer for each of these missteps.
