Fertitta: Exhausting 3-Year Search Led to New Insurance Policy
Chris Nelson May 9, 2011
After June 1, fighters on the rosters of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Strikeforce will be able to breathe a little easier when they tear an ACL in training, get banged up in a fender-bender, or otherwise come into harm’s way outside the cage.
Monday’s announcement that UFC and Strikeforce parent company Zuffa, LLC, will in June begin providing its roughly 350 contracted fighters with free “24-hour worldwide medical life insurance and dental coverage” was met with virtually unanimous acclaim from the MMA community. Predictably thrilled, too, were the fighters themselves: the Strikeforce contingent learned of the policy in person during Monday’s Zuffa fighter summit in Las Vegas and reportedly gave the news a roaring round of applause.
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“As you can imagine, when you walk into an insurance company and say, ‘Yeah, we want to get full coverage for 400 Ultimate Fighters that includes all of their training and everything else in their lives,’ they pretty much slam the door on you pretty quick,” Fertitta said during a Monday media conference call.
Working with an insurance broker and Houston-based specialty
insurance group HCC Insurance Holdings, Zuffa’s dream policy
finally became reality in the first quarter of 2011. The policy
detailed Monday by Zuffa officials provides $50,000 in annual
coverage for each fighter under Zuffa contract. Fighters will pay
no premium and will be covered anywhere in the world, in the event
of any injury.
Convincing any company to provide such extensive insurance for men who pummel one another for a living required some creativity, explained Lawrence Epstein, UFC executive vice president and general counsel.
“Most insurance brokers are not very sophisticated when it comes to understanding the sport of mixed martial arts,” said Epstein, who encouraged potential underwriters to examine the UFC’s event-related claims from past events. “For the most part, there weren’t huge amounts of medical expenditures associated with those injuries.”
Those same claims helped inform the amount of fighters’ annual coverage, as Epstein stated that “virtually all of the injuries sustained during events were covered within that $50,000 number.” While the company’s initial thought was to provide fighters with, essentially, training insurance, the coverage was expanded in order to eliminate any potential conflicts over the origin of some injuries.
“We didn’t want there to be any disputes with the insurance company regarding, ‘OK, was this injury the result of a training accident, or did it happen somewhere else?’” said Epstein, noting that the new insurance will be supplemental to the $100,000 policy each fighter carries into a bout. In other words, if a fighter is injured in the Octagon, the medical bills won’t be deducted from his $50,000 annual coverage.
While officials declined to say how large an annual bill Zuffa will foot, Fertitta said the new policy will be “a substantial expense on the part of our company.
“In combat sports, this has actually never been done,” Fertitta said. “We are stepping up in a major way, in a way no fight promoter has ever done.”
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