Jimmy Flick on retiring early: UFC fighters are ‘too stupid to unionize’
Jimmy Flick opened up on his surprising retirement, noting how in MMA, there’s too much risk involved, with not enough pay.
Flick is currently under his Contender Series contract, which starts with a $10,000 base purse. The former LFA flyweight champion says that he also works as a CNC operator, and earns $40,000 a year, with 401k and other benefits. After over a decade fighting professionally, he made it to the sport’s biggest stage and won impressively, but felt that he still couldn’t afford to quit his day job.
“There’s no benefits of beating my body up no more being in the UFC. We have no 401k. We have no benefits. We have no fallback,” Flick told
MMA Fighting. “Fighters are too stupid to unionize, and it’ll never happen, because there’s other fighters that will fight for that money.”
What Flick touched on, happens with the UFC’s control of the market, where instead of the athletes working to get everyone paid better, fighters just have
“reverse auctions” and bid each other down in hopes of getting a high profile bout.
That hinders fighter pay, and Flick noted how the amount of risk involved factored into his decision to call it quits. He says this became more evident when his opponent Cody Durden pulled out and rescheduled, then Flick ended up cutting a lot of weight twice in 12 days.
He managed to win by submission and get that discretionary $50,000 performance of the night bonus, but still realized the sport will take so much more than what he’s willing to give.
“You don’t bring much in, but you keep striving for more, but I keep losing more time with my family,” he said. “I’ve been bottling it up and using that to motivate me and to push. I don’t know what I’ve done to my body. Nobody knows what we do to the insides from the mental toughness, to the training, to the weight cutting.”
In the full interview, Flick also opened up on his family and tough upbringing. He detailed how he thought fighting in the UFC and sticking with mixed martial arts would help reunite him with his father and former coach. But once it “didn’t make a difference,” he only realized he was “fighting for all the wrong reasons.”
