Imagine a pro quarterback with Peyton Manning’s talent playing
up in the Canadian Football League instead of the NFL. Or picture Tiger Woods shunning the PGA and all the major championships to star in the
second-string Nationwide Tour. It may sound ridiculous, but the
fast-growing, wildly popular sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) is
grappling with such an unthinkable, uncomfortable scenario.
And it couldn’t come at a worse time. Just as the sport’s
premier league, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, prepares to
stage its milestone UFC 100 event in Las
Vegas this Saturday — which is expected to attract more than 1
million pay-per-view purchases — the top fighter in the world has
no plans to participate. Instead of slugging it out in Sin City,
Fedor Emelianenko, 32, will be training in a small Russian mining
town 385 miles south of Moscow, preparing for an Aug. 1
pay-per-view fight in Anaheim, Calif., against former UFC champion Josh Barnett. That fight is being
co-promoted by M-1 Global, an Amsterdam-based organization in which
Fedor has an ownership stake, and Affliction Entertainment, an
upstart UFC challenger whose financial
backers include Donald Trump and Mark Cuban (Cuban’s cable network,
HDNet, televises Affliction fights). Why isn’t Fedor fighting for
the more established brand? “The UFC wants
his mind, his soul, his body,” says Joost Raimond, chief operating
officer for M-1 Global. (See pictures of women’s ultimate
fighting.)
A former member of the Russian army who possesses an assassin’s
glare and a face-denting right jab, Emelianenko, the top-ranked
heavyweight in the world, is so good he is known simply as “Fedor,”
according to the World Alliance of Mixed Martial Arts. He has won
30 fights in his career and lost just one, a controversial
referee’s decision in Japan nine years ago. Fedor has already
beaten five former UFC champions, two of them
twice. He has finished four of them off in the first round.
“He’s the best,” says Freddie Roach, a famed fight trainer who
has worked with boxing greats Mike Tyson, Oscar de la Hoya, Manny
Pacquiao and Fedor’s last opponent, Andrei Arlovski, whom Fedor
knocked out in three minutes in January. “He’s so calm. He sees
things happening. If you make a mistake, he’ll knock you out.
That’s the mark of a great fighter.”
Not having that great fighter as part of the UFC has been a rare black eye for a promoter that has
enjoyed a meteoric rise over the past decade. Led by its irascible
president, foul-mouthed ex–aerobics instructor Dana White, the
UFC has turned the blood sport from a fringe
combination of boxing, wrestling and Taekwondo with a handful of
followers into a global spectacle that has come to dominate
pay-per-view television. The UFC generated
$300 million in pay-per-view revenue in 2008, surpassing both
boxing and pro wrestling for the second straight year. According to
the UFC, 473 million TV households in more
than 60 countries now have access to its programming; that kind of
reach was enough to get White and his partners a $1.2 billion offer
to sell the UFC about a year ago, which they
ultimately turned down, according to White. “And we haven’t even
scratched the surface,” says White, no fan of understatement.
“We’re still so far from mainstream. I am 100% confident that we
are going to be the biggest sport in the world in 10 years.” Sure,
that’s a bit much, but the UFC’s hold over
mixed martial arts is so complete that most people just call the
sport “ultimate fighting.” (See photos of boxers fighting their way
out of poverty in Thailand.)
According to Fedor, White offered him a UFC deal two years ago. “What they wanted was very
rigid,” says Fedor, through an interpreter, during a recent
interview in New York City, where he had gone to promote the Aug. 1
fight. In conversation, Fedor is serene, but his narrow eyes are
piercing, just like those of one of his biggest fans, Russian Prime
Minister (and martial-arts practitioner) Vladimir Putin. “The
bottom line was that the UFC was a one-sided
offer, and you know, that’s something that can never be
acceptable,” he says.
Fedor says White demanded that he fight exclusively with the
UFC. Given his stake in his own promotion
company, M-1 Global, that would have been a significant sacrifice.
Fedor also insists the UFC would have
virtually owned him if he won and would have been able to dump him
if he lost. “If I was the UFC champion, I
would never be able to leave the UFC,” Fedor
says. “The contract would just keep extending and extending. But if
I lost, they could just kick me out of the UFC.”
Further complicating matters, Fedor also specializes in another
form of martial arts called sambo. This judo-like sport was
developed for the Red Army after World War I and is now a Russian
pastime. Under White’s dictates, says Fedor, he’d have to stay away
from sambo. “That’s something I do for the pride of my country and
is very important to me,” says Fedor.
TIME asked White to respond to Fedor’s
accusations, and he pulled no punches. “Let me put it to you this
way. I’ve done fight contracts with all the best fighters in the
world,” he said, working his way to the knockout blow. “With big
huge superstars — Brock Lesnar, Chuck Liddell, the list goes on and
on. Who the f_ is Fedor? Are you serious? The guys who fight for
me have a chance to make a lot more money fighting with me than
with anybody else. If he signed with us, he’d find his place in
history, find out if he really is the best heavyweight in the
world. It’s all semantics. It’s all bulls_.” It wasn’t the
first time White had used fighting words. At a UFC-fight press conference in April, White said, “Fedor
is not the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world … Fedor is at
a buffet somewhere in Russia.” (Read “Ultimate Fighting’s Ultimate
Fight.”
So despite growing pressure from ultimate-fighting fans who want
White to sign Fedor, it doesn’t look like the pair will be doing
celebratory vodka shots anytime soon. “Fedor doesn’t make or break
my business one way or the other, you know what I mean?” says
White. “The reality is, I don’t need Fedor.” Still, over the long
term, the Fedor-White standoff could leave mixed martial arts much
like pro boxing, decimated by warring promoters and fighters, with
talent spread across too many divisions for followers to keep
count. After all, no sport can keep rolling in the dough if fans
keep feeling shortchanged.
