Lashley Tops March Badness Salaries
Posted by Justin H on Mar 25, 2009 at 7:15 am ET16 Comments
Bobby Lashley
Over the weekend Roy Jones Jr.’s Square Ring Promotions hosted a hybrid MMA/Boxing card in Pensacola, Florida. Bobby Lashley and Omar Sheika topped the confirmed salaries, while Jones (via the promotion) took home two thirds of the event’s net profits, according to a report obtained by MMAJunkie.
In general the MMA fighters got a better pay day than the lesser boxers on the card. Only two of the MMA combatants received less than two thousand dollars on the evening, while six of the boxers did not reach that sum. Also, none of the boxers received win bonuses.
MMA PAYOUTS:
- Jeff Monson: $25,000 (including $10,000 win bonus) def. Roy Nelson: $30,000
- Bobby Lashley: $40,000 (including $10,000 win bonus) def. Jason Guida: $15,000
- Din Thomas: $10,000 (no win bonus) def. Gabe Lemley: $5,500
- Dennis Hallman: $6,000 (including $3,000 win bonus) def. Danny Ruiz: $2,000
- James Freeman: $600 (including $300 win bonus) def. John Mowry: $300
BOXING PAYOUTS:
- Roy Jones Jr.: TBD (two-thirds of the event’s net profits) def. Omar Sheika: $50,000
- B.J. Flores: $12,500 def. Jose Luis Herrera: $12,500
- Eric Clinton: $800 def. Richmond Dalphone: $800
- Kieyon Bussey: $1,200 def. Robert DaLuz: $1,800
- Kelvin Price: $1,500 def. Kevin Howard: $1,500
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800 bucks to fight period, is unbelievable. I mean you can make that kind of money at Burger King every two weeks.
I’ve never heard of anyone at BK making $10/hr unless they’re a manager, but then I never worked fast food personally.
Well 800$ at BK is just a comparision. No matter what it is nothing for a fight.
Forget $800, Mowry made $300. And I would say that MMA is a bit more dangerous than boxing. Makes me wonder how much guys fighting at those semi-sanctioned Native Reserve fights.
Ok well no one has seemed to notice that the MMA fighters as a whole made more money than the boxers did, ofcourse you have the $800 here and $300 there for the boxers, but the hell of the thing is where are all the people who say that MMA fighters don’t make shhhit? you know the guy that says ZUFFA should pay their fighters better and the only fighters that make real money are the boxers therefore boxing isn’t dieing? The best thing that came from this “March Baddness” card his this very-much in your face reality that hmmmmmmm unless you are Oscar or Manny you probably don’t make a damn thing being a boxer where are the millions that the boxers are making….. I love that everyone ****es about Jardine making 60g’s to show and he should be paid more and it doesn’t matter if he signed the contract bullshhhit that nameless people argue all over the net are being rather quiet when something like this comes out, and hey look MMA guys are getting paid more than boxers and this makes you realize that the 6g’s to show for some “new” UFC fighter isn’t half bad its a lot better than $300 dollars, where are the people now that are stating that the boxers are the only ones making money and ZUFFA doesn’t respect their fighters enough to pay them properly…?
They aren’t going to come out here because this is black and white proof they are wrong. They aren’t even willing to say they were wrong and are just shills for someone’s personal agenda against Zuffa.
Anyone else smell fish?
I must humbly disagree with u fr702 on this one. Not to beat a dead horse, but I love both sports(Maybe Boxing a lil more) But its a fact that Boxers as a whole make more money than MMA fighters. For example: U mentioned Oscar and Manny, but Mayweather, Jermaine Taylor, Sugar Shane, Winky Wright, Bernard Hopkins, Vitali and Vladimir Klitshko, Ricky Hatton, Miguel Cotto, Marco Antonio Barrera, Roy Jones, Joe Calzahge, Antonio Tarver, Kelly Pavlik, and Arthur Abraham are all current boxers that I can think of off the top of my head that wont fight/”Show Up” for anything less then a Million dollars. In most cases these guys are making Multi Million dollars just to show. This list isnt even including fighters that have made a million to fight just this past year alone: Juan Diaz, Antonio Margarito, Juan Manuel Marquez, Amir Khan, Joshua Clottey, Nikoli Valuev, Chad Dawson, Felix Surm, and Paulie Mallinagi.
The reality is there will be many more as well, reason being there are just so many Chances to fight for one of the four major belts “WBO, WBA, WBC, IBF” So it creates a wider avenue for a challenger/mandatory to step in and make a very lucrative pay day. I also believe this is what is killing the sport at the same, but thats another arguement thats not for this site. So I ask that you take into consideration when viewing the salary comparison that the boxers viewed above are all stable fighters under Jones, completely unknown to the boxing public. While in contrary u have at least 4 recognizable names on the MMA side. Omar Sheika was the only known fighter but he cashed in against Jeff Lacy 4 years ago and hadn’t been heard from since….
In other words I may be wrong but after looking at the reported numbers for UFC 96: The total gate was 1.8 million, the paper view buy rate 375,000, if u times that by 50(the price to order)You get 18,750,000. You add the gate and the PPV together and U get a little over 20.5 million dollars, Now I understand that the UFC only recieves a certain percantage of the PPV, thats fine because even if they only recieved 20% of the PPV they would still gross over 5.5 million for the show and thats NOT including the money the UFC recieves from sponsorships. So this is a lowest case scenario sum. Now yes they need to cover the cost of the venue, and securtity, which usually doesnt exceed the 300k mark. So not including the money the UFC RECIEVES in Sponsors were looking at LOWEST case profit of 5 million dollars
Out of this Keith Jardine recieves 55,000 to fight/show in the MAIN EVENT. That in my personal opinion SUCKS. lol But not to beat a dead horse. lol
Hey bzul3 don’t apologize or be humble about disagreeing with me, by all means you have some rather valid points.. The hand full of “big names” do make the top dollars hell it is that way in any sport right? The lower tear gents not so much, I personally believe that ZUFFA as a whole have a better pay scale then most of the boxing promotions do and this imo is a good place to start, ya know with proof and all….. People would be going F~ing crazy if say Kurt Pellagrino made $800 dollars to fight for the UFC, people would be blaming Dana or some shhh…
Sheika only made 50,000 for his main event apperance and he was a “champ”, hell Jardine is a top ten (IMO) but never has been champ, plus alot of UFC’s fighters get a cut of off the PPV sales either everytime they’re on the card or if they’re the main event.. See my point is that ZUFFA pays their fighters rather well from top to bottom in comparison to boxing promotions (with evidence of this payout info), ZUFFA has a minimum of dollars that they pay fighters and yes ZUFFA makes their money forsure they are in business you know.. Now I can go on and name fighters that make over a million per fight but I believe we all know who they’re, and mind you with ZUFFA being a privately help corp the contracted base salary is pretty much all they have to disclose publically, I doubt that Jones Jr was giving the kid that made $300 any sort of “kickback”….
Hey I’m not saying that all of boxing is corrupt and bad and that fighters don’t make money, it is clear that they do.. If you have a “big name”, if you’re some kid with an ok record you don’t make shhh, plus I was kinda pisssy about the fact that people come on here after every PPV and say ZUFFA doesn’t pay well, so for the first time we had the dollar amount of what boxers (just your typical boxer) was getting paid and it shocked me to see how little they were making.. Furthermore, I miss boxing, what it use to be and quite frankly don’t really want to watch it because for the “big names” its only about the money no longer for the passion of the sweet science… cheers
On the UFC numbers, please remember that many fighters also get a percentage of the live gate and PPV, which is not disclosed.
I did some googling (god I hate turning that into a verb) to see if I could find out 2 things:
1) How much do the cable companies take from each PPV purchase?
2) What percentages do fighters get from PPVgate/buys?
I found absolutely nothing on 1. I suspect no one will ever comment publically on that because the cable companies don’t want to risk it coming out that different cable operators charge different rates and the promotions want their
On 2, I found a couple interesting things. One said that top-tier UFC fighters got, on average, $2.50 per PPV buy. Look at that number compared to the cost. About 5% of the consumer cost to one fighter. At 500,000 buys, that’s 1.25M.
The other vthing I found was a conversation regarding Randy’s disputed contract with the UFC. It allegedly had the following scale (assuming 500k buys):
Up to 100k buys= Nothing
100k – 175k buy = 75k buys @ $1 = 75k
175k – 300k buys = 125k buys @ $1.50 = 187k
300k – 330k buys = 30k buys @ $2 = 60k
330k+ buys = 170k buys @ $3 = 510k
Total? 832k. That works out to (for this example) an average of $1.66 per PPV buy. If you take that up to 700k buys, that’s 1.43M for an average of over $2 per PPV buy. Now, imagine the Chuck-Randy or the Chuck-Tito or the Randy-Brock cards and how much the UFC loses off the top.
Base pay is a straw man. For the truly big names, it is a meaningless number because it MIGHT cover taxes from the real income. For the lesser-known, it becomes a flash point because it looks like no one is making money.
I’ve said before that I’m not opposed to a 5k minimum for a UFC card. I’m actually not opposed to a bit higher or for the UFC to work with fighters to find better sponsorship deals or to give them free training at UFC gyms when (if?) more open.
But ultimately the idea that any of the BIG names in MMA are underpaid needs to stop. 1-1.5M before sponsorships for 4 months of work is not underpaid on any scale.
(willing to post links but didn’t necessarily want to post them here to be indexed by search engines)
DbiZ coming through with some information, he even used googling as a verb, nice bit of Info truely my friend good work….
All great points and thanks for the insight!!
Roy Jones Jr.: TBD (two-thirds of the event’s net profits)
John Mowry: $300
What a joke.
Sure Jones Jr. is the big name and should make the most but if you can pay one guy over half of your profit, you can afford to give the lesser guys more than a grand.
If they wanted to make the lowest salary 2k it would take approx. $7 800 to do so (adding to everyone’s base salary to give them a starting total of 2k before win bonuses). Is it that difficult to tell Roy Jones Jr. that he gets 2/3 of the net profits minus about 8k so other fighters can live off of something decent for their hard work?
The fighters will always be hungry to make money and 2k per fight is not going to feed the family in the long term so it’s not like they will become complacent anytime soon because they are making the big bucks…
-BTW I’m bad at math so don’t rag on me too much if I got that wrong, it’s close enough to make a point. 8k is chump change for Roy.
Firstly, Jones owns the promotion, so technically he can pay himself whatever he wants. Second, 2/3 of the net profit of the event doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a lot of money, I think it will be, but it is not guaranteed, and the other fighters’ pay is already cutting into that net profit.
I am one of those people that says the UFC dosn’t pay their fighters enough but I don’t mean they underpay their fighters. I’m the guy saying.. woah wait a minute.. Lidell just got 500k to fight Jardine who makes 13k WITH a win bonus!? (these numbers may not be correct I know it was something like this) and other similar instances.
The UFC IS the big show they have the cash but IMO they could be helping some of the newer fighter with a little more cash for appearing because it costs a ****LOAD of money to compete at the level of the UFC and fighters need to be making money not only to live but to train.
I just find that sometimes the salaries are very very very unequal in the UFC which is a shame IMO because if you give the young guys enough money to train properly they will come back and be even better fighters.