Rampage Jackson has publicly admitted he will be returning to the Octagon in order to finish his contract with the UFC.
Bloodyelbow has the latest straight from Rampage’s blog:
Now, I wanted to let my fans know that I’m going to come back to the UFC & finish my contract. Not because the haters are talking shit about me being scared of Rashad or Titties or anybody else. I’m coming back for my fans & to shut Rashad’s mouth up & shut Dana’s mouth up. Then after that I’m going back to doing movies & I might do a boxing match once a year just to stay in shape. Hate on dis!
Payout Perspective:
It’s more or less what everyone expected, and certainly a piece of much needed good news for the UFC. Furthermore, if you look at the history of the UFC’s relationship with its fighters, it’s not a stretch to imagine that Dana White and Rampage could patch things to the point that Rampage decides he’d like to continue fighting beyond his current contract.
The news is pretty fresh, and we don’t really know a lot at this point, but it’s conceivable that Rampage vs. Evans could help to co-headline the GSP fight in March (which would essentially give the organization it’s first solid, top-end card in the span of 6 months.
Just saw that Pacquiao vs. Mayweather is on for March. How does this news affect any UFC show in March?
Why is Rampage talking about doing boxing after he fulfills his UFC contract? DId the UFC impose some kind of lifetime no-compete clause on Rampage, barring him from fighting MMA outside of the UFC, in exchange for not suing him?
anderson silva,tim silvia,andre arlovski and now rampage going BOXING lol….so the ufc would beat soccer huh? pacman would earn $20 million in his fight in march….so expect more defection from mma fighters…..dana promised them paradise..but up to now ufc and mma still pays little money….500t for brock lesner the HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP….cheap
Kelsey,
Can you give us a clear brief on why there is such a dramatic difference in the purses in Pro-MMA & Pro Boxing? Especially at the elite level. Does it come down to the pure monopoly factor or is the television rights and casino gambling the key?
It seems crazy an ESPN Friday Night Boxing fighter can make 20-50k – while on an UFC undercard they pay 5-15k. Is it a big problem w/ UFC contender level talent being able to make better pay days fighting on local or mid-level shows? Purse +selling tickets on commission and bolt on merchandise?
Is just another case of the good old American way- the fat cats at the top stay fat on all the cream?
I definitely agree w/ ggg – 550k for a HW Champ is cheap- did he not make much more doing choreographed leaping elbows off the turnbuckles?
If you covered this all before- I apologize-can you give me the archived link?
i dont think he intends to be back for March, possibly Summer after shooting and training.
a few things first…peter, it doesn’t effect March UFC event because they are different dates.
Ed, you cannot retire out of a contract. So if Rampage retires, if he ever decides to compete in fighting/boxing, he can’t sign a contract because his other one is still valid.
and then ‘ggg’…wow, you you are telling me that if the best P4P boxer on the planet makes 20 million that AA, rampage, A.silva and tim sylvia can do the same?? am i missing something here? lol
This is good news for the UFC and I like the idea of a big card that includes GSP on it to get people back talking about the UFC. woo! go gsp!
Go check the other fighters on Friday Night Fights. The UFC spreads the wealth. Dont forget the ufc has an entire sport it has to market all year long. Not just when one guy fights. There is a reason guys in the ufc can be big names after a few fights and boxers need 20 or 30.
The salary discrepancies between pro boxing and mma are simple to explain:
-(disclosed) inflated salaries have only existed twice in mma – for the Affliction shows, which proved to cause the organization’s downfall, so it is a mistake in the mma industry that won’t be repeated.
-The UFC is the largest and most prominent mma organization, so they pretty much set the market standard in terms of mma fighters’ salaries. Dana White has pubicly stated that he feels inflated athlete salaries have caused lots of problems in other sports, and he has sworn that he will not pay comparable salaries to what the stars of other sports receive. If the biggest organization in the sport only pays 5-15k for “lower tier” fighters, why would any other organization pay more? In boxing, however, inflated salaries became commonplace, and thus the market competition between boxing promotions dictated the standardization of what fighters were worth.
-Tickets for boxing shows tend to be much more expensive. A major boxing show with a popular boxer can bring in $10 million plus merely in gate revenue, while even the biggest mma shows have shown to only bring in $4-5 million. This dramatic increase in gate revenue allows for larger salaries to be paid, in addition to the PPV revenue which is usually much more than the gate.
-Lower tier boxing fighters do not usually make much more than lower tier mma fighters – people tend to focus on the salaries of boxers like Mayweather when comparing boxing salaries to mma. What people have to realize is that boxing has been around for a long, long, long time, and pro boxing stars were making millions long before mma ever took off in 1993. There is no precedent for mma fighters to make anything in the realm of what pro boxing stars make, so why would this just happen due to people crying out injustice on internet forums?
-People continue to fail to realize that a fighter’s salary as disclosed by the athletic commissions is only a portion of their total income for a performance. In the case of Brock Lesnar, who has been brought up in the article, the $500,000 or so mentioned is only his BASE SALARY. Lesnar, like other UFC stars, receives a portion of all PPV sales for any event he fights on as a part of his contract. This can amount to over a million dollars per fight. The best example of this was doing the Randy Couture contract fiasco when the UFC actually released (for the first and only time ever) copies of checks that Couture had cashed that were given as PPV share money. Couture’s base salary for UFC 74 was publicly disclosed as $250,000, but he received a check for around $750,000 for his PPV share in addition to that, and UFC 74 wasn’t even a hugely successful PPV. In addition to that, mma fighters receive income from sponsors, and for lower tier fighters, sponsor payouts can sometimes match or exceed there base salary. In Couture’s case stated above, people were even mentioning at the time that $250,000 dollars wasn’t fair for one of the UFC’s biggest stars, when in reality he made well over a million dollars, and that event was well over two years ago!
Some good points by Machiel Van.
Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that boxing and MMA have traditionally run very different business models. Most boxing promotions are skeleton organizations that source their production, marketing, and PR from networks like HBO, Showtime, and ESPN. While most MMA promotions – the UFC being the best example – are larger in scale and do a lot of production, marketing, and PR in-house.
The boxing promoters can afford to share more with their fighters – especially when their gates are $15-20 million and PPVs are 2+ million as is what’s likely to be the case for Pacman-Mayweather.