Zuffa

(Props: Bloomberg.)

In the same month that Zuffa announced it had taken out a $100 million loan to pay off part of a revolving credit line and provide a payout to the owners, Dana White is now hinting that a 10-15% stake in the UFC could be sold to a private investor. As he told Bloomberg News:

Hmm. How much cash does Shane McMahon have laying around at the moment? And why does Zuffa need so much of it lately? Has the UFC become financially overextended? Are the Fertitta Brothers looking to cash out following the Station Casinos collapse? At any rate, if you have nine figures to invest in an exciting sports property and don't mind the fact that you'll have zero input in the company's direction, give Dana a call.

(The Booyaa Fight Girls: Voted most likely to lie to you about working their way through community college.)

Banning clothing brands as potential sponsors is so much fun, Zuffa is at it once again.  MMA Payout reports that the newest addition to the blacklist is Booyaa Fightwear, an apparel-maker whose loose affiliation with the King of the Cage organization was enough to torpedo their proposed sponsorship of Mike Budnik in his WEC bout this week. 

King of the Cage was part of the Pro Elite network of organizations, but is one of the few entities that can still promote fights and is still somewhat capable of scratching out a living as small-timers.  Apparently this makes KOTC, and by extension Booyaa Fightwear (if ever there was a company name more inspired by the mid-nineties, I've yet to hear of it), a perceived competitor of the WEC.  And we all know how Zuffa deals with competitors. 

('Fuck you, pay me.')

When we looked at the payouts for WEC 36 and saw $14,000 next to Urijah Faber's name, we had little choice but to assume that Zuffa was screwing him like a one-legged Panamanian hooker: cheaply and with shocking disregard for his delicate feelings.

But Faber's manager, Mike Roberts, says that figure was "not even close" to a full accounting of what Faber was paid to face Mike Brown:

"That was an accurate statement of the check he received that night. Some contractual issues came up after the September fight was postponed and that $14,000 was the remaining balance of what was owed to him. That is not what he made."

[...]

"Keep in mind Urijah’s still fighting off an old contract, but Urijah’s been well taken care of for the last couple fights."

(Make an offer, but ring announcer Tim Hughes comes as part of the set.)

Even though the IFL has filed for bankruptcy and their best fighters have all signed on with other organizations, they are apparently still looking for a buyer who wants their video library badly enough to pay for it. Jay Larkin told Sherdog that when the UFC used some of their footage to hype former IFL fighters who had signed on with Zuffa, it wasn't because the UFC had paid for the video, it was because the IFL was just "helping out." It's the least they could do, after all the help the UFC did for them.

But check Jay Larkin's sales pitch when it comes to the IFL:

“You don't always know what you got till it's gone. There's a lot of lessons to be learned,” said Larkin, a longtime boxing programming executive with Showtime. “One of the things I tried to do was do it in a more professional manner. The bottom line is, I feel MMA is a one-organization industry. I think UFC has done a spectacular job of branding, and UFC has become synonymous with MMA. And there's a couple of hangers-on now. Wall Street’s having a hard time right now. I'd like to see MMA flourish but I'm very skeptical.”

In other words, please buy this stuff, but if you're anyone other than the UFC, you'll just be wasting your money.

I once went to Sears to buy a power drill and the stoned college kid working there responded to every one of my questions about various drills by telling me all the bad things about them, finally concluding that the one they had on sale "just generally kind of sucks." I did not buy a drill that day. As sales strategies go, pessimism and ennui rank somewhere near the bottom. Larkin would do well to keep that in mind.

(Ooh-rah! Proud Marine Luigi Fioravanti stomps the crap out of bark-eating hippie Luke Cummo. Photo courtesy of FightwireImages.)

MMA Mania is reporting that the UFC will hold a free SpikeTV event for the troops at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on December 10th. The event will be free for military personnel to attend and will likely feature former members of the armed services who are now fighters. It will be the first time the UFC has been in North Carolina since UFC 5 (Charlotte, 4/7/95), and just the second UFC event to be held on a military base (after UFC Fight Night 7 in December '06).

The addition of this Fight Night card means that the UFC will be holding three events in December — the Ultimate Fighter 8 finale will take place just three days later on December 13th, and UFC 92 will go down two weeks after that on December 27th. Besides a WEC event rumored for 12/3, no other major MMA promotions have announced events for December yet, so the holiday season could be completely Zuffa-dominated.