Lorenzo Fertitta

(Guess who's back?)

Well that didn't take long. Jon Fitch is once again a UFC fighter, and will still fight Akihiro Gono at UFC 94, as planned. Apparently all it took was a conversation with Lorenzo Fertitta. MMA Rated has the scoop:

"Communication kind of broke down with Dana (White) so we talked with Lorenzo," Fitch told MMARated. "(I) just got off the phone with him and we came to an agreement. We’re going to move ahead and I’ll be back in the UFC. We’re going to sign off on the video game and I’m back. It was never even about the agreement or the contract. It was the approach that we felt Dana was being a little bit hot-headed and was threatening us right off the bat. It didn’t seem like a professional way of doing things."

Cooler heads, as they say, have prevailed. Should the ease with which this was resolved once Fitch and his management team were able to speak with someone who wasn't Dana White perhaps tell us something? Threatening, bullying, saying things in the media such as "[Expletive] them. All of them, every last [expletive] one of them," maybe that's the kind of thing that doesn't help negotiations with one's employees, who one claims to want to be "partners" with. Thankfully Lorenzo Fertitta is on board to smooth things over.

Now you have to wonder, what lesson will Dana White take from this? Fitch did sign the contract. The UFC got what they wanted. Will White now be convinced that he can get what he wants if he plays good cop, bad cop with Lorenzo? Or will he see that sometimes talking things over is preferable to flying off the handle? Let's hope it's the latter. Right now Lorenzo is looking like Michael Corleone and Dana is looking like Sonny. And we all remember what happened to Sonny.

("Can we take that one over again? Andrei blinked and Rothwell wandered into the shot." Photo courtesy of CageToday.)

MMA Weekly reports that UFC and Affliction executives met late last month to build a formal partnership that would allow Affliction to return to the UFC as a major clothing sponsor and work with the UFC to create co-branded apparel. In exchange, Affliction would agree to cease operations as a fight promotion and allow the UFC to buy out several of their fighter contracts. Unfortunately, the détente began to fall apart after EliteXC's "Heat" show on October 4th, when Affliction's ads plugging Fedor's next fight made UFC executives feel that the deal wasn't being taken seriously.

On Monday, a conference call was held between UFC and Affliction execs in an attempt to resurrect the partnership. Details are sketchy, though MMA Weekly reports that the call quickly turned hostile, with Affliction co-founder Todd Beard at one point telling Lorenzo Fertitta "you've fucked with the wrong guy." So for now, it looks like Affliction is still shut out of the Octagon, and will continue to burn money as a fight promoter. Their next event, headlined by Fedor Emelianenko vs. Andrei Arlovski and co-promoted by Golden Boy, goes down January 24th at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California.

(Props: MMA Scraps)

It's kind of creepy to hear Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta say almost exactly the same thing when asked by Fox News how the economic meltdown will affect their business. It's as if they're reading off the same cue cards. Clearly, this is a conversation they've had before, and most likely pretty recently as they've tried to figure out whether a piss-poor economy means they should cash in their chips and start hording gasoline and ammunition in the Nevada desert somewhere.

When it comes to pay-per-view buys, their logic holds up. You get six or seven guys together to split the cost of a UFC pay-per-view and it's cheaper than going to a movie. Live ticket sales might be another matter, but big shows like UFC 91 in Las Vegas will still sell out, especially when they can count on the casinos to snatch up the ridiculously-priced tickets at Octagon-side.

MMA Payout recently broke down Lorenzo Fertitta's claim the UFC has seen a "double-digit increase" in pay-per-views buys this year. Turns out it's true, but just barely. 10.8% growth is technically double-digits, even if most of it is a result of holding two pay-per-view events in the UK in 2008, as opposed to just one in 2007. Domestic pay-per-view growth was at a meager 3.3%, but that's still not cause for panic.

As we've discussed before, for some reason pro fighting is one of the sports that typically does well during hard economic times. Ballet, on the other hand, straight up tanks when the going gets tough. That's right. Fuck you, ballet.

(Lorenzo Fertitta, second from the right.)

UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta, who made $113.8 million last year as president of Station Casinos is resigning from his position in the family business in order to work full-time to expand the UFC, develop the brand internationally, and secure more big-name sponsors. He and Dana White will now be "co-heads" of the company; Lorenzo's brother Frank Fertitta III will become Station Casinos' CEO while retaining his 45% ownership in the UFC.

White and L. Fertitta made the announcement to their employees today at Palace Station (a Station Casinos property), and the news broke via Yahoo!'s Kevin Iole, who acknowledged that Dana White's "long-awaited announcement, which had many in the industry in a lather speculating about what it might be, may turn out to be ho-hum news to the sport’s hard-core fans." Said Lorenzo Fertitta:

“The problem, if there is a problem, is that the business has gotten so successful, it’s requiring more time, focus and attention. Station Casinos is a business my family and I have built and now it’s a multi-billion dollar company. But the reality is, the UFC has gone through so much growth in the last eight years, my brother and I felt we’d be better in divide and conquer mode...

Think about this for a second: India has 350 million men between the ages of 18 and 34, and that’s our key demographic. The magnitude of these markets is staggering...The UFC is going to have a global footprint in the not-too-distant future. We’re already working on furthering our position in Brazil. This is getting so big that it demanded I spend more time with it.”

Much of the mystique of UFC co-owners Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta stems from the fact that we don't see them cursing and making outlandish statements every day like their president and public face. Not that Lorenzo Fertitta's statements are any less outlandish, but when he shows up to the occasional press conference or does the rare interview, we tend to pay a little more attention; clearly, the man has decided to speak because he has something important to say. In this interview with Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports, Lorenzo — ranked 380th on Forbes Magazine's most recent list of the 400 richest Americans, with an estimated fortune of $1.3 billion — discusses the state of the UFC's business and whether Dana White ever embarrasses him with his big mouth. We've gone and excerpted the best parts below.

On MMA being the country's "fastest growing sport": "A lot of people talk about the growth of MMA. I don't believe in that. I don't know where anybody can show me there is this great success in MMA outside of the UFC. There has been explosive growth for the UFC, but MMA in general, nobody is making a breakthrough. The biggest non-UFC pay-per-view, you might know better than me, but it's something like 25,000, maybe 30,000 buys. There is a bit of a misnomer there. It's not the growth of MMA. It's the growth of the UFC."