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The event to which I refer, of course, is the 16th birthday gala thrown by UFC President Dana White for his son Aidan. Sure, UFC Fight Night 134 went down, as well, but there were no belts and precious little star power on display on Sunday in Hamburg, Germany. As a side note, that card dragged on so long with so many consecutive decisions and such slow pacing that it warped space-time. The resulting wormhole spit me out the other side into an alternate timeline where Anthony Smith knocked Mauricio Rua senseless inside of 90 seconds. Please tell me I don’t have to stay here.
Back to the birthday extravaganza. The first thing I should make
clear is that none of what follows here is about the kid. He’s a
kid. A fortunate kid doing fortunate kid things. If indeed there is
any fault or blame in this whole situation, and I’m not sure there
is, none of it applies to him. Who among us, if offered a
million-dollar birthday bash for our 16th birthday, wouldn’t have
wanted that kind of treatment? If Migos and A$AP Rocky aren’t your
speed, substitute a couple of the hottest artists in the musical
genre of your preference. I’m thinking back to what I would have
wanted at that age, but I’m fairly certain Fugazi would have
refused to play an event like that for any price.
On the topic of fault and blame, why do I care at all about this outlandishly lavish party? Why do we care, collectively? And we absolutely do; you may protest that you personally don’t care, but the MMA news and social media space reverberated with reports and takes on the event, starting with the UFC’s psy-ops wing and state information ministry, TMZ. There was even some self-congratulatory video where the UFC’s head man mentioned the difficulty in topping the 16th birthday party of his older son, Dana Jr., who had “only” had Kendrick Lamar perform.
Wealthy people throw ostentatious bashes for their kids all the time. The overwhelming majority of those bashes mean nothing to me. This one is galling because the money that went into it was part of the zero-sum game that the UFC’s finances represent. Some small part of that money came from me, from my UFC Fight Pass subscription and pay-per-view purchases. I don’t begrudge that; I’m the one who chose to pay for those fights, but that money also comes from the same pie that feeds the fighters who sweat and bleed for my entertainment. It’s been pointed out that the party cost more than the entire reported payroll of the “The Ultimate Fighter 27” Finale earlier this month -- including the performance bonuses. In a sport where the ratio of athlete pay to revenue is as dismally low as it is in MMA, that is an especially ugly snapshot in time.
It leaves a bad taste that all of this spending, this literal seven-figure birthday party, comes from the figurehead of an organization that is so famously, toxically stingy with its own labor force. From the ethically and legally questionable straddling of the line between employee and contractor to the reluctance to pay fighters who meet their weigh-in and publicity obligations only to have their fights fall through -- witness the back-and-forth involving Brian Ortega this month -- the UFC’s parsimony with its fighters is arguably its most defining business characteristic. That the party was thrown by the public face of the organization, the one who is typically making those decisions -- and making them public with such obvious contempt and venom for the fighters who produce that revenue -- is even worse.
Is this stinginess a necessary belt-tightening in the post-Ronda Rousey era, where the sport’s biggest-ever female star is gone and the UFC is hoping against hope that Conor McGregor and Brock Lesnar fight for the first time in over a year and over two years, respectively? No, of course it isn’t. For one, fighter pay and benefits have always been low, even during the promotion’s self-acknowledged salad days. However, more importantly, the UFC is doing fine, according to the man himself. Better than fine, in fact: White is on record as calling last year “the best year in the UFC’s history by a long shot.” Less hyperbolic sources agree that 2017 was a banner year for the organization, but they point out that the huge take from McGregor’s boxing match with Floyd Mayweather masked an overall downturn in PPV sales.
Which is it? Is the UFC experiencing a boom, and if so, how is that still being built on the backs of fighters getting as little as $10,000 to show? Or is the organization in fact going through a lean phase?
Nero was the 5th emperor of Rome. One of the signature events of his rule was a fire that raged through his capital city for over a week, causing extraordinary amounts of damage and suffering. Later, legend had it that Nero looked on from a nearby hill and played his fiddle as the city burned. It isn’t true, but as character assassination, the story has few equals: Nero looking on with a sense of casual detachment, knowing that the hardship wasn’t likely to affect him or those closest to him. I like to think he was wondering how to outdo himself for his next kid’s birthday party.
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