Dan Hardy critiques the UFC's monopolization and dangerous weight-cutting culture, recounting his Fight Island 3 confrontation with referee Jai Herbert and the subsequent video removal. He advocates for numerical weight classes while analyzing how ego distorts fighter perception, contrasting "button mashing" with elite feinting techniques used by Adesanya and McGregor. The discussion highlights the efficacy of specialized coaching over large gyms, citing Alex Pereira's success under Glover Teixeira, and calls for rule changes like legal knees to the head to enhance competitive integrity beyond current restrictions. [Automatically generated summary]
And it was the second fight of the night where it had happened.
There was a heavyweight that had gone down and just took a bunch too many shots before the fight was stopped.
But the Jai Herbert Francisco Tronaldo one was the one where you heard me shout up and yell, stop the fight.
And it was just a weird circumstance.
And look, you know, caveat Herb's a great referee.
He's refereed me a lot.
But.
Every now and then, people do make mistakes, and in Fight Island, everyone was tired, it was quiet in the arena as well.
So, you can, I mean, you can hear me yelling.
It wasn't the first time I'd done it though.
I yelled at him in Moscow for a CB Dollarway fight.
And it's the thing is, there's a point where I'm there for the knockouts, I'm there for the blood, but I'm also there to make sure that once it's done, it's done, and those fighters are protected, right?
You know, and the way that that that Jai Herbert fell, it was just.
You get the reads, you know it.
You see him fall, and you're like, man, there's something not right about the way that he's falling.
And then as he landed, he was looking up at the lighting rig, but his arms were kind of stretched out.
So, Herb's basically, and Herb's, Don't move very quickly most of the time, he's a big old boy, and but he was moving at pace towards me, so I stood up, took my headset off, and put them down or had them in my hand.
He came over and he started yelling at me, and you know, you stay out of it, can't be shouting, and this and that.
And that's where you see me go, That was two times, it's the second time of the night.
Um, after the, I mean, as it's going on, and this was when we're not doing interviews in the cage as well, right?
And we're shaking hands in the hotel and everything, and it was kind of odd.
But because I'm not going into the cage, I'm now turning around and my interview camera is behind me.
So basically, what the USC wanted me to do when Herb's marching over to me was to stand up, turn my back on him, and put my headset on.
Me as a martial artist, I'm not going to turn my back on someone when they're moving at me with the kind of pace that he was.
So everything got a bit delayed because I was having an interaction with Herb.
As soon as the event was over and I was on my way over to the ESPN desk, Herb and I bumped into each other and we had just had a brief minute conversation.
Everything was cool.
I said, Look, I respect you as a referee.
You left that one too late.
There was no doubt.
And it was the second one the night.
And there are other instances where it's happened, right?
And I think someone had kept hold of a choke too long.
And then Goddard had separated the fight, and then he came over to Mark and he's trying to push Mark and stuff.
And when Dana actually made the statement about if you approach an official, you'll be gone, that was actually in reference to the other thing that happened, but it was linked in with me as well.
The thing that pissed me off is when I got back to the hotel or to the airport or whatever, Herbert posted this video, and he was like sitting at the airport, you know, trying to justify what had happened.
But it was just like, he was saying things like, if you think you're the smartest guy in the room, and just like poking at me, just constantly.
And I'm like, I've got a bunch of hours sitting on a plane on the way back to the UK now.
And you know what I'm like?
I'm pulling this apart and I'm like, did I step out of line?
Did I say something I shouldn't have said?
And I'm assessing it.
And then I'm going, no, hang on.
Hang on a minute.
Like, my intention is to protect that fighter that needed protecting, right?
His family are at home sitting watching that.
They don't want to see him getting smashed in the face unnecessarily.
They know the risks of the job already.
So, I kind of sat on the plane on the way home and I'm like, how am I going to deal with this?
So, I dealt with it the way that I would always do.
I get all the facts on the table.
I try and organize my response.
And what I did was I created a video that I put up on YouTube, which the UFC actually contacted YouTube and had them delete off the back end.
And it was about an hour and a quarter long.
It was a decent chunk of information.
But I went through what had happened on the night, other circumstances where Herbert maybe not pulled the trigger quick enough, or times when he'd been indecisive, like Cowboy Masvidal.
Not sure whether you remember that one.
Cowboy went down at the end of the first round and they actually helped him back to his stool and sat him on the stool.
And Greg Jackson's going, Hey, Cowboy, you're okay.
Everything's fine.
Then he went out and got TKO'd at the start of the second round.
But if you remember that, Herb jumps in and waves the fight off at the end of the round.
And then decides to restart it in the second.
So I pointed out a bunch of things where he could have maybe done a better job.
I also gave him the benefit of the doubt in like the Robbie Lawler Ben Askram fight, where to me that wasn't stopped early.
You could see Robbie Lawler's arm fall for a second.
I think he went out for a split second in that moment.
But in the scenario, I just left the ESPN desk, and this is like five o'clock in the morning or something now after the broadcast, and I walked backstage.
I won't mention his name.
I love him.
He's a lovely guy.
But everyone's kind of ragged and tired in Fight Island.
You know what I mean?
And as I'm walking back to my dressing room, he came flying at me.
And he's like, hey, you can't ever approach an official, and blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a fucking minute.
And like, just the intensity that he came at me with just spiked my adrenaline again.
And I'm already kind of like, I'm heightened because the flights have just ended.
You know what it's like with adrenaline?
I'm like, three days, I'm like excitedly shaking after a good event.
And it was just the energy that he came at me with just pushed my energy up.
So then we had this back and forth where I'm like, hey, you need to get your facts right.
He approached me, and blah, blah, blah.
And I don't know whether that information had already been passed on to people.
Above him to say, Dan Hardy's just approached Herb Dean after the fight, when in actuality that just never happened.
And I mean, the thing is, it's like, I've been working with that man for a long time, the guy backstage I'm talking about.
I love him.
He's a lovely guy.
We've always got on.
If I saw him now, we'd have a good conversation.
It was just, you know, it's like a heightened experience, and just the energy that he came at me with, especially with the misinformation of me now, you know, being the guy that took my headset off and marched over to the door to wait for Herb as he walked out.
But ultimately, above my job and above everything, UFC and everything included, I'm there to make sure that the MMA is stable and the fighters are safe.
Right.
Because that's my instinct, you know.
Everybody that gets in that cage is someone's son or daughter or father or brother.
You know what I mean?
Mm hmm.
And in those moments, the people in the cage go from being the best fighters in the world to a very, very human victim that is not being protected by the referee.
And from a fighter's perspective, I want to feel that warlike feeling when I step in the cage.
I want to feel like I can throw everything at my opponent.
And I also want to feel safe that they can throw everything at me, right?
I don't want to have in my mind, oh, hang on, do I need to pull this punch because the referee's not going to jump in?
Like, there are three people in there, and one person's got the job to protect both of us.
Neither of us have a responsibility to protect each other.
We don't have a responsibility to pull a punch after a knockdown, we don't have a responsibility to stop when the bell rings, right?
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Potentially, but then if you've got one arm in between and you wave him with the other one, you know, I just don't, you don't need to, you don't wave at the end of the round.
You want the judges, you want the referees to know about fencing response, to be able to recognize all of the different tells of a concussion, right?
So, and I didn't know about fencing response until after the Jai Herbert fight, but I had in my video that was taken down, I had lots and lots of different.
Versions of fencing response from K1 to football to rugby, all kinds of stuff.
It's a tell of concussion, right?
Like consciousness is not removed immediately with every punch, is it?
Like you've got everything on a spectrum.
You're either completely conscious or completely unconscious, but the window in which the fight needs to be stopped is probably 5 or 10% towards the end of that spectrum, right?
The point where someone's unable to defend themselves or not intelligently defending themselves.
And unfortunately, those big muscular guys can cut more weight because muscle is more water.
Yeah.
But it's horrible.
Like, I mean, look, Izzy landed a perfect punch on Pereira, but I feel like Pereira at middleweight just could not take the same kind of shots that Pereira can take at light heavyweight.
It's just, you're dehydrating the shit out of yourself.
He would weigh in 40 pounds more than he weighed, like on Fight Night.
Like, I invested too much in getting bigger and stronger and.
Because when I was fighting before the UFC, I mean, I was fighting 10, 12 times a year, and I needed to stay close to weight.
So I was always within about 10 pounds.
There were very few fights before the UFC that I cut a lot of weight.
And then when I was fighting out in Japan, because I couldn't use sauna, I just didn't want to put myself in a position where I was having to trash bag and sweat out on the streets of Tokyo.
I mean, that was back when they didn't have those options, like those small portable sauna options that they have now.
Like, there's some of them, they have these hot boxes where it's like they have a little tiny heater in there and you zip it up and you're in this little thing and you can kind of carry it with you on the road and you can check it with your bags.
And that was one of the reasons why I changed the way that I was doing it because I should have stopped that guy in the first round and I didn't have the power to it.
And that was his last fight.
He passed out after the fight, went to the hospital, he had a bleed on his brain.
He was the favorite to win the Cage Force tournament, and I pulled him in the first round.
And I went out there just with the intention of doing a normal weight cut, you know, six or seven pounds, exactly what I would normally do.
I had a little bit more to cut because of the flight.
But I honestly, hand on heart, believe that if I'd either not cut the weight or I'd cut the weight in a better way and rehydrated, I would have been able to stop him and he wouldn't have had the brain damage that he ended up with.
You know?
Because, like, I look back to that third round and I just didn't have the power.
It was like a bad dream where I'm just punching him and he's just.
I mean, but again, like, I have no guilt associated with that because we knew what we were doing when we got in there, and I would not hold it against him if that had happened to me.
You know what I mean?
But in hindsight, pulling the whole thing apart.
Like, I could have been a better version of myself as a martial artist, and it would have actually probably saved him some of the damage that he ended up taking in the third.
I've actually developed a A system of introducing weight classes over the next several years for the PFL.
I mean, obviously, the problem that we have is that some weight classes are just not filling out because the fighters are just not there, unfortunately.
But I also think that's a bit of a result of the monopolization and the kind of killing off of the grassroots of the sport because the sport's not growing like it was in my day.
I mean, obviously, you know, I love the UFC and I've always held Dana and the UFC and what they've created for us in very, very high regard.
But there has, in my opinion, we've passed the tipping point now where now we're starting to see some of the negative effects of them kind of locking down everything.
Because, like, there are certain organizations that are connected with the UFC and they're enabled by the UFC through Fight Pass, and then they become almost like the Feeder like LFA, exactly right.
But then a lot of these, a lot of those shows are now starting to get dropped off of Fight Pass, right?
And the reason for that is because Contender Series is replacing them.
Aris, I always say it wrong, Aris is the and they were dropped from Fight Pass, yeah, yeah.
I think they've been picked up again now, but you know, but.
This is my thinking behind it, right?
And I remember back in the day when I was fighting on cage warriors in the UK and the UFC were coming over once or twice, it started to kill off all the other shows because everyone was like, I'll just save my money, I'll wait for the UFC to come.
Before the UFC came over and staked a claim in the UK, we had a lot of shows that were kind of popping up on weekends.
I was up and down the country and across Europe all the time.
But then when we started having two or three UFC events a year, a lot of the smaller shows just.
And look, and what they did when the UFC landed in Europe, they legitimized the sport.
And then, you know, so the perspective started to change very quickly.
Like when I was doing, when I had my title fight in 2010, I would say at least half of the interviews that I did was trying to justify the sport and why I was allowed to do what I did, right?
And the thing is, and I'm very much, you know, as long as you're not hurting anybody else or you're agreeing to power slap for your ability to power slap each other.
I think it's much more digestible in these very short clips.
You know, I don't think there's a person like, there's some fucking hardcore MMA fans who can tell you about guys that are competing in the amateurs and tough enough and they're making their way to the UFC and they're fighting in the LFA.
There's guys that are coming in their debuts and you can watch YouTube videos of guys.
Breaking down these guys' skill sets, and you never even heard of these cats.
Guys who are fighting in Russia, guys who are fighting in Brazil, and there's no power slap hardcore fans.
There's no like this guy, you gotta see him slap, you gotta see him take a slap, you gotta see the way she stares down her opponent before she gets slapped.
Like, yeah, it's not the same, man.
It's not, I mean, you can watch it, you could do it.
I don't have a problem with it.
This is America, I believe in freedom, but don't do it.
Yeah, she got an artificial disc, which is really interesting that they could do that now.
And guys go, look, Altramane did it and came back better than ever.
I mean, everybody was so upset at him the way he won the title with Piotr Jan, but he had a legitimate neck issue going into that fight, and that illegal knee that he took to the head really did fuck him up.
And then he went and got an artificial disc put in his neck.
And then came back and dominated in the rematch.
And then, did you see him in his last fight?
Yeah.
Fucking dude, man.
That guy has the best back control in the game.
His back control is so elite.
It's really incredible because he gets a hold of your back, man.
And I don't mean to keep picking on officials, but that is another situation where I actually feel quite bad for Aljo that he had to put on that performance and damage his brand in such a way because he didn't want to continue fighting.
Like, if I mean, and I think there was a poll done a while ago with Olympians, like, if you can win a gold medal, but you're going to live to 30 or 35, would you take the gold medal?
And a good portion of them said, yes, they absolutely would.
Most athletes, in order to achieve their goals, would do absolutely anything.
So, if I all of a sudden discovered that having your neck fused like your Romero means that you've got a 30% chance of, you know, less chance of getting knocked out, how many fighters do you think without their neck fused just to bomb the advantage, right?
He described the cup and ball as looking larger and said his ability to read greens improved, he went on a notable win streak, winning five PGA Tour events in a row right after the surgery.
I mean, like some of those guys, you fight Hong Man Choi or Bob Sap, no matter how confident you are in your skill set, just the sheer size of them is a problem.
Well, I worked for the UFC before that as the post fight interviewer, but that was in 97, UFC 12.
I remember that.
And so I did it from 97 to 98, and then it was costing me money because I would make way more money if I'd go work at a comedy club for the weekend than I would doing this.
But it was fun.
So I did it for a little while, but then it was like, I think it was UFC Japan.
They wanted me to fly to Japan.
And Frank Shamrock was fighting Kevin Jackson.
Is that who it was?
I think he won by first round armbar.
And I was like, I'm not going to fucking Japan, man.
It was crazy because, like, you know, one of the first events that I did for the USC, I did for free.
I did like the first 15 events for free.
And I just said, just get my friends' tickets.
So it was like Eddie and I would go and, you know, we'd be like, bro, it's fucking happening.
It's actually happening.
But even back then, it wasn't famous.
It was just, it was in Vegas and it was, you know, It was kind of getting a little bit of attention.
It wasn't until 2005 that Forrest Whitaker, the main event of, rather, excuse me, Forrest Griffin and Stefan Bonner, main event of The Ultimate Fighter, that one fight changed everything.
It's really crazy where, like, the stars align with one fight, the whole sport takes off.
I mean, I was because I'd been sidelined because, you know, because of my heart situation and they wouldn't clear me in California.
So then the UFC just wouldn't match me anywhere.
And I'd had a, I'd had like a month or two of just kind of wallowing and being depressed and, you know, avoiding MMA gyms.
And Lorenzo had invited me into the offices on Sahara and I got and sat with him and we were chatting through and he said, Hey, you know, I'm I'm going to send you out to California.
I want you to go and see my specialist, you know, my family specialist and get a second opinion and et cetera.
But he said, also, we've got another plan for you.
He said, I won't spoil it.
At some point, you'll see Dana and Dana will tell you what the plan is.
And as I was, it was like a movie.
As I was walking out of the offices, a stretch monster Hummer pulled up.
Literally, I'm like, what's going on here?
And Dana got out and he was like, oh, just a fucking blah, blah, blah.
I just wanted to see.
He was like, I want you to go to the UK.
I want you to be an ambassador.
I want you to do commentary.
And I said, That's great.
You know, let me know what I need.
Media training.
He's like, No, none of that.
I just want you to be you sitting cage side.
And I remember getting to the first USC London event and sat down at the desk, just fighting imposter syndrome bad, and seeing all the fans starting to trickle into the arena.
And then someone from the truck came through and said, Oh, I've just realized we've not practiced any post fight interviews.
I said, Oh, I'd not really thought about it.
But It's just talking to fighters.
I'll be fine.
He said, No, no, no.
I'd feel better if we practiced.
I said, Okay.
He said, Okay.
Brad Pickett wins by knockout.
Go.
I'm like, How did you knock him out? was my first question.
And it was weird because it was like, I'd not even thought about it up until that point.
But when they raised the.
When they asked me to do the kind of practice rehearsal with not any scenario that was realistic, then all of a sudden I started to panic.
But I remember sitting there feeling like a.
Like a 14 year old, like someone's going to tap me on the shoulder in a minute and throw me out.
I think because I wasn't getting paid, I probably thought it was just fun.
Yeah.
I probably didn't think it was a job.
So I probably thought, like, oh, they just want me to do this because I'm famous and it would be good for the sport if the fear factor guy is enthusiastic about the sport.
So that's how I thought about it.
And so, like, I would go on like the Howard Stern show and stuff, and we'd wind up just talking about the UFC.
And this was, again, I wasn't even working for the UFC.
I was there to promote Fear Factor, but I was talking about how much I loved UFC.
And I just think it's awesome.
And back when I was competing, no one knew what the best sport.
It's so hard for people to recognize that today because it's not that long ago, you know?
Like when I was last time I fought was like 88 or 89.
You would think like we kind of had it sorted out back then, but you didn't, no one knew.
No one knew, like, what was the best thing to study.
I remember I went to this gym.
A friend of mine was teaching at this university, and I would go and train with him and his students sometime.
And I would go there, and they had a judo program there.
And I'd be like, look at these suckers practicing this stupid judo.
Like, this is useless.
You can't even kick anybody.
Meanwhile, all those guys would have killed me.
They would have just grabbed me and fucking thrown me on my head.
But I didn't think that.
I was totally delusional.
I thought I was going to kick them into the fucking shadow realm.
And no one knew what the right thing was.
Thing the study was.
If you took Kung Fu, you thought Kung Fu was the shit.
Bruce Lee, right?
I'm wearing a Bruce Lee shirt.
He was really the only guy that was wise enough to realize you just got to take a little bit from everything.
And having one style, whether it was his initial style, which was Wing Chun or, you know, whatever it is, karate, that's not the way.
The way is the right way to win.
In close quarter combat, you need to learn how to grapple.
You need to learn boxing.
You need to learn how to block correctly.
You need to learn how to kick correctly.
Back then, we didn't know.
And we always wondered, like, what would happen if they did, like, a fucking put a bunch of guys together.
And I knew Benny the Jet had competed in some weird stuff in Hawaii, but no one really knew.
So when it was finally happening, To me, I was like a little kid.
I was like, oh my God, it's happening.
It's really happening.
And I was like, please let this work.
Please let this work.
And then to watch the evolution of it from the beginning, which is just Hoist going in there and dominating everybody because no one knew Jiu Jitsu.
And he had the Gion, so he had all this friction.
It was amazing.
And then everybody took Jiu Jitsu, including me.
I'm like, I got to learn Jiu Jitsu.
And then to watch the evolution, like these giant, juiced up fucking wrestlers come along, like Mark Coleman, and Mark Kerr smashing everybody.
They're like, oh my God, we got to get on the sauce.
And so everybody, you know, Vitor got up to like 240 pounds and his fucking neck started at the top of his head.
Oh, yeah, bro.
I was training at the same gym as him when he made his UFC debut.
And Vitor just fucking took him to the ground and bang, hit him with like 30 fucking unanswered punches in a row, like in three seconds, like and put him away.
And then they're screaming, Jiu Jitsu, Jiu Jitsu.
And I was like, wait a minute.
This is not, I mean, I get it.
You know Jiu Jitsu, but that was boxing.
You used striking.
But it was like to be there at the very beginning and watch this evolution.
Well, it was weird because I think I was one of the first people to do it that had a real understanding of jujitsu.
So, when the fights would go to the ground, the play by play guy would have, you know, like Goldberg, great guy, didn't train, didn't know what the fuck was happening.
So, I would have to, and also people at home, what's going on?
So, I'd have to walk them through exactly when someone's in danger and why they're in danger and how they can get out of it and when they're free.
Okay, see his elbow?
He's free now.
He's good.
And so, my mind is spinning like 100 miles an hour.
I'm like, now I don't have to do that as much because people kind of understand things much more.
But there's certain situations and certain positions where I would have to say, no, this is a submission.
Like, he's very close here.
Like, okay, now he's got to cinch it up.
He's got to put his ankle behind his leg.
He's got it.
And you'd have to talk people through it.
So it was different than any other sport because you're kind of like educating people on what's happening.
Like I couldn't use obscure.
Even though I used the obscure term, like crackhead control or something like that, like weird stuff like that, that Eddie comes up with these fucking ridiculous names for submissions and positions.
But I would have to explain why this works and what's happening and what's going on and what's in danger.
And it was weird because I felt like this obligation to jujitsu that.
That was the one thing.
Like, you could.
Someone kicks you in the head, you get it.
Someone knees someone in the head, oh, you hit him with a flying knee, you get it.
But explaining someone, like, what, like, you know, a calf crusher is, like, that's a weird fucking position.
You know, explaining to someone, you know, why a triangle works and why it doesn't work and why someone's safe, you know, with a head and arm choke, why, okay, he's okay, he's got his hand over his ear.
There's.
It was all this weird stuff where it was.
Partially trying to be entertaining, but also trying to educate.
And I had to kind of figure it out as I did it.
You know, as I called, I don't know how many fights I've called.
You know what I've suggested, as well as a thousand other things that I've suggested to the PFL, but a master's division.
Right?
You know, the likes of Cowboy and Tony Ferguson and the guys that you want to keep fighting, but you don't want to see them just get smashed by Chamaev.
Yeah, it is a problem when you see those old veterans that still have something to offer, and then you see them getting thrown in there with some 27 year old assassin.
And the thing is, it's sad about it as well, and this is where I feel like the community around MMA has probably changed in the last decade or two.
The old, the veteran fighters were just carried in such high regard, whereas now you're the highlight of somebody else's, the start of somebody else's career.
And a lot of the fans, I mean, certainly what I see online, they're very dismissive of fighters that at one point were great and are now not quite where they used to be.
And, you know, they start throwing around words like washed and stuff.
Yeah.
You've got to.
You've got to respect where these guys came from.
Like, no one lives forever.
No one is at their athletic peak forever.
But we also should still be celebrating what people have achieved, you know?
And I feel like that's something that we're not, we don't get as much in the sport.
And that's partly because the young fighters get matched with the veterans to, you know, like, you know, bring Ken Shamrock back out of retirement and dust him off for Rich Franklin to fight him because no one knew who Rich was and he was so close to a title shot.
And I mean, not that Chamay have needed it, but the boost that he would have got from smashing the hell out of Nate Diaz, you know, that was kind of part of the benefit of throwing Nate into that fight, you know.
And they're the fights that I would like to not see anymore.
Because I think we get more fights out of some of these guys towards the end of their career where they, maybe their athleticism is not where it was, but their knowledge is way ahead of where it used to be.
Right.
We go back, you know, we were talking about the old days and when we're first getting into it and when MMA first became a thing.
Like me as a 17 year old sitting, I wheeled the TV in with the VHS and I put the tape in and I watched UFC 2 and 3.
And I had this feeling of I'm like, now I'm questioning myself and everything about me as a martial artist.
I have to do this.
And if I don't do this, I'm going to be questioning myself my whole life.
But at the same time, I'm looking at this going, well, I know one martial art really well, taekwondo, and I know probably four or five other martial arts.
All right.
You know, Wing Chun.
I'd done some traditional jujitsu, I'd boxed quite a lot, you know what I mean?
So, like, I had a decent handle, but I also have a library of martial arts books.
And I would sit in front of that library and think to myself, like, how am I going to consume all of this information?
And it wasn't like, okay, I need this bit of information and this.
And it wasn't a case of absorbing what is useful and rejecting what's useless.
I had to absorb everything in order to go through that shedding process.
And it just felt so overwhelming.
I remember going into fights feeling like, I have no idea how this is going to play out.
I don't know half of this guy's skill set just purely because I haven't had the time to learn all of this stuff.
And it's like the more you pick at it, the more, you know, it's like you're hitting a rock and all of a sudden it falls in and it's a massive cave inside and it's just full of information.
And I'm like, how am I going to consume all of this knowledge?
You know what I mean?
I remember feeling very, very overwhelmed by it all.
And that fed into a lot of anxiety during fight week, which was, you know, something that everybody always manages.
If I look back, that was where my anxiety came from.
It was the over analysis of the sport and the feeling like I was never going to be able to learn all of this information.
Whereas now, in actuality, I feel very, very opposite.
I feel like now, if I was going back, my training would be very, very focused and very, very streamlined.
But that's because I've had years and years of experience of watching the sport and knowing what works and what doesn't and pulling things apart.
You know what I mean?
So it was almost like, and I said this, I've said this to a lot of young fighters.
If I, in my career at one point, could have stopped and taken six months out or a year out just to be a student and just to learn and absorb, that would have been a real benefit for me.
When I stopped fighting and I was doing commentary and doing inside the octagon and stuff, like my knowledge was growing on a daily basis.
I felt it.
And I just thought to myself, man, I could have done this when I was in my career.
But I didn't because I was.
I was partly scared of the over analysis of it, you know, and partly concerned that I was going to show myself so much that I didn't know that I was just going to feel like it was endless.
It was a bottomless pit of knowledge, you know?
Whereas when I started doing Inside the Oxagon and I was watching fights in chronological order from the beginnings of people's careers all the way through, and then I was going back and I was watching prelims of fights that I wouldn't have watched in my career because I only want to watch this guy and this guy because I don't want all of this.
Sometimes I watch somebody and feel like I'm getting worse when I'm watching them.
You know what I mean?
So I'd be very, very specific about who I would watch.
Whereas in actuality, if you watch the whole card start to finish, the fight IQ increases generally as the card goes on.
So the guys at the top make far less mistakes and they're the guys that I'm watching.
So I'm watching people that are, you know, way closer to flawless than I am.
But if I watch the prelims, I can see the same people, the same mistakes that people are making.
They're just making them far more regularly on the prelims.
So it was almost like watching the prelims was uncovering problems.
And bad decisions much quicker than it was when I was watching the few specific guys that I was trying to learn from.
So there was a real benefit in just absorbing all of it.
And then the next stage was, and it was specifically Robbie Lawler against Roy McDonald.
It was the first time I realized I was watching a fight without putting myself in the cage.
And it was like an epiphany.
I was like, oh, I'm just watching these two guys as a fan.
I'm not comparing Robbie Lawler to me and Roy McDonald to me.
And my process of Preparing for an opponent was very similar to what I would do for an analysis.
I would get into him, I would watch it as much as I could of that person, but then I would go back and watch my fights that I knew were available to them.
So now I'm watching my fights with their skill set in mind, right?
So now I'm almost pretending to be that person to watch me and go, okay, well, I can do this to him and I can do this to him.
But there's always a bit of ego involved there.
So, like, say with Carlos Condit, an incredible fighter.
Right, he's great at everything, but he's not gonna be able to take me down, and there's no way in hell he's gonna be able to knock me out.
You know, Mohawk flapping in the wind, you know, and it was like, and that was my ego getting in the way, right?
Because if I was looking at Carlos Condit versus Robbie Lawler or Carlos Condit versus GSP, I would have respected his counter punching, right?
But my ego was a block in that scenario.
So by watching two fighters and being able to remove myself entirely, I just saw things differently, and it took my shit out of it, it took my drama out of the way.
And the way that they deliver their techniques, there's such an elite level of intelligence to it that it's easy to just think that it's chance what they're doing, right?
Like, take Conor McGregor Cowboy, for example.
Right.
And the beauty of Inside the Octagon is I would download all the angles of the fight.
I would watch every angle, the full fight from the whole angle.
So I'd see different things.
And there's a moment in that fight.
And this is the benefit of, say, Conor McGregor, say his brand is the left hand, right?
Conor McGregor's left hand brand was a very, very powerful weapon for him to take into the fight against Cowboy because Cowboy was so focused on it.
And there's an angle from, from, Cowboy's backed up against the fence and he sees Connor close his left hand.
And straight away, Cowboy goes, Left hand's coming.
And he moves on to the head kick.
It was the threat of the left hand coming that had forced Cowboy to make that mistake.
Anderson Silver, Vitor Belfort, when he looked at his leg and kicked him in the face.
Like the idea of him being able to sell.
And you look at that fight, Vitor's checking the inside low kick while he's got Anderson's toes in his mouth.
You know what I mean?
It's like he was able to sell a technique purely with his eye line, purely with a feint.
And Adesanya is another master at it as well.
And that to me then shows that there are, we've got ranges in MMA, but in each one of those ranges, there's dimensions as well, right?
There's dimensions of understanding.
Like you could be a button mashing fighter, and a lot of people have success with button mashing.
They throw the technique that they worked in the changing room, warming up on the pads.
But then there are people that understand that each one of these techniques and each thing that they do or piece that they have in their arsenal is a setup for something else.
Like TJ Dillashaw is probably his greatest student.
And TJ fought completely different than Dwayne.
He constantly switched stances, constantly was like, he was giving you so many looks.
And, you know, it's wild watching when, you know, you watch like Dwayne style versus what he would teach.
Because it was just like, oh, if I had only known this while I was fighting, if I had only known this while I was coming up, if I had only known this early, early on in my career.
And this is where I don't think we get enough people crossing over to coaching afterwards.
Like, whenever I see a former fighter in the corner, Mike Brown, Robbie Lawler, whoever it is, like, I'm filled with confidence that the sport is moving on because they're going to pass on information that they've taken on from somebody else and refined.
You know, like my taekwondo teacher told me when I was a kid, if you're not better than me at my age, I've failed as a teacher.
He used to be able to heel hook himself and he created the double bagger, and there's a few different things.
But I remember being on the mats and watching Eddie Bravo listen to one of his 16, 17 year old students to see what he could learn from him.
And that's such an unusual thing in a lot of martial arts schools the teacher being a student, right?
And that's something that always stood out to me about particular people.
Like, I would never want to train a fighter and hold anything back from them because I always want to be just a little bit better.
You know, I want to give you everything, throw everything I've got on the table, and then see what you pick up, see what you run with, and see what you can teach me from it.
I was just saying to the guys here, it's funny, the Joe Rogan experience, if you'd have asked me what the Joe Rogan experience was 20 years ago, it was getting crushed inside control.
That was my experience of Joe Rogan.
Being on the mats during the class and watching you smash the bag with your back kick and then stepping onto the mats and just.
And you almost had the opposite game to most of the guys on the mat because all the 10th Planet guys were pulling you into half guard or into guard and trying to wrap you up, whereas you were very much a top game player.
Yeah, that's at least how it felt to me.
It was like you were the different role on the mat to everybody else.
It was either that or not tapping the guillotines.
But I got a head and arm choker.
It developed it where it was like, if I locked it on, you were pretty much done.
You know, and when I started tapping like brown belts and higher level guys with that, and then I just really concentrated on it.
And it's one of those things where it's like, you know how it is.
Just like with a kick.
Like everyone has strong legs, you know, you can lift weights with your legs, but like how come some people can kick harder than other people?
Well, it's the coordination, the technique, the refinement of it, where it just and there's something like that in a squeeze, like Marcelo, like Marcelo would get your back and his rear naked choke.
Marcelo Garcia was just like a master.
He's not a big, strong guy.
Like, so what is it?
And so I that was like my number one go to was the head and arm choke.
If I could get that shit, I was pretty.
Sure, I could lock it up.
So I just developed this style of just crushing where I would just have my whole body would just lock onto something like a pit bull.
Especially when you've got, and then this is where the dimensions come in.
You know, you've got the button mashes at the bottom, you've got the guys that have refined their button mashing skill sets, and now they've got two or three combos that work well for them, or they've got a particular technique that they refine to a point where they can deliver it in 10 different ways.
But then you've got people that understand that each one of their weapons.
Is a different thing at a different time and serves a different purpose at a different time, you know?
Yeah.
Like with a jab, for example, everybody in their game has got a jab.
But if you strip that jab down into its core components and you go, you know, you look at like a secondary identifier, right, of that technique, there are going to be differences, right?
If I throw my right hand straight and I throw it over your jab or I throw it when I split your cross, that to me is three different techniques, right?
It's the same.
The same weapon that you're using, but the delivery system's different, right?
Right, but then on top of that complexity, you've got all of the damage that you can inflict that draws responses to people, right?
Like the calf kick.
Now you can feint a calf kick and get someone to pick their leg up.
And that's a very, very basic example.
Or when someone's been hit with a body shot, you feint a body shot and their head's almost always open.
There are certain things.
I mean, headshot dead is another good example.
How often do you see someone throw a punch followed by a kick and knock their opponent down?
Well, you've always been a very thorough guy in the way you analyze things, which makes you a perfect candidate for someone who's a commentator because you really have a very complex understanding of the mechanics of movement and of all the different things that are happening.
You're not just like, oh, we hit them hard.
You're looking at all the different layers and you analyze things on multi levels, which I always find fascinating.
You have a great commentary style, it's really excellent.
Because it's like one of my daughters has my recall, my ability to like, she'll talk about like, you know, whatever it is.
Like, she can rattle off like information about the Titanic.
Like, she's like, you have your fucking dad's brain.
Like, that's nuts.
But I do, when I do it, I look away sometimes.
Like, I look up.
Like, I'm talking about things.
I really want to be clear about what I'm saying.
I look up.
And it's because I want to, I think it's because I want to take out the element of eye to eye and communicating with someone.
Looking away while thinking, Known as gaze aversion, a common cognitive behavior that helps people process information by reducing external distractions.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing.
By looking at an empty space or upward, the brain shifts from environmental input to internal cognitive tasks, such as memory retrieval or complex thinking.
Well, you know, people don't think about that, but when you're involved in multiple tasks at the same time, You know, you're taking away your ability to concentrate and do a great job at any one of those things if there's multiple things going on at the same time.
That's why, like, I used to do interviews in my car and I stopped doing them because I sound like a moron.
And I realized this because I'm thinking about cars.
It's like I'm conscious and cautious all the time.
I feel right now like I'm kind of holding my tongue on a lot of things, just purely because I kind of know that when I start talking, I'm just, ah, you know, because that's how I am.
And there's this understanding of that as an audience member.
You're supposed to be able to accept that.
But then you have these cunts out there in the world that are just looking to find words that someone said and ascribe them as if they're, you know, put it down on paper as if this is a statement.
Like, this is what this person actually thinks and believes.
I think comedians and satire is one of the last lines of defense against tyranny.
I really do.
Like, I watch Prime Minister's questions every Wednesday.
And I listen to just the nonsense that comes out of it.
And we've got Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenock just going at each other over just nonsense.
It's not nothing real, no real quality of conversation is coming out of that.
But what I feel like is if we had a panel of comedians sitting in the gallery somewhere, you know, you've got Robert Mitchell and Ricky Gervais and James A. Caster and a few others just sitting there just going, well, that sounds like nonsense, and then poking fun at it and making a joke out of it.
It brings a reality to people.
Things that I don't think we're lacking in a lot of ways.
Well, I think that's what comedy is in many ways it's a test.
You test things.
It doesn't mean it always works, and it doesn't mean that jokes are always funny, and it doesn't mean that sometimes people don't overreach.
Patrice O'Neill had a great statement about that where he was talking about something that happened on the Opie and Anthony show.
He was on Fox News and they were criticizing it, and he was saying, You've got to understand that all jokes come from the same place.
They all come from the place of trying to be funny, and some of them you might find a And some of them you might laugh at really hard, but it's the mindset, the place that it's coming from is all the same.
And I was like, that's so wise because that's really the best way to describe it because that's really what everyone's trying to do.
They're just trying to make people laugh.
It's just sometimes it doesn't come out right or sometimes it's a miss, like, especially if it's an ad lib.
Like, at any moment in time, you generally don't know what the next word out of your mouth is going to be like right now, right?
The stage for that one to start with, when they were both being kept separate and Dana was there, and then when they went on stage, I was on Connor's side of the stage at the bottom of the stairs.
The anger just emanating off Aldo the whole day was exhausting for me just to be around.
And then after the press conference where Connor had taken his belt, as soon as they circled back and they were behind the thing again, Aldo was like beside himself angry.
Yeah, and as soon as I saw that, I'm like, wow, that is it's.
That's like a level of witchcraft that you see in the fainting of striking.
And when you can start to pull somebody's emotions out like that.
Yeah.
And for me, I think fighters should be completely impenetrable.
Like, no one should be able to say anything to a fighter to upset them.
It's an immediate weakness that you throw on the table for someone to get their teeth into.
I like the fact that his coldness is a part of his brand, oh, yeah, you know, yeah, he's very cold, that stare down, yeah, like him and Yuri Prohaska, it's so.
If you can make someone afraid of something or sensitive to something, you know, and I was always a big fan of Marcus Davis and I knew how dangerous he was in the division.
But I also knew that if I poked him enough in the right direction, I would get a particular version of him that suited me, right?
And there were two versions of Marcus, right?
There was the Marcus that showed up and he was like, Stacked, looked like the Hulk, and then you're like, okay, he's gonna grapple.
Or there was the Marcus that was a little bit slender and he just looked different.
And that version of Marcus Davis was knocking everybody out.
That's when he's coming into box.
And I knew that if I pushed him enough, because it was easier for me to deal with the heavily muscled grappler version of Marcus Davis than the slick southpaw boxer version.
So my thought was if I can push him to be really, really angry at me, he's not going to want to roll the dice on striking games.
He's going to want to edge his bets and try and force the fight into the range that I'm not very good at.
So there was a purpose to it.
But as soon as he bit on it, I was like, that was too easy.
That was too easy.
And like, there were clips of him training, he's like, his nose is bleeding, and he just looks.
And then that's when I'm, for the weigh ins, I made the I Hate Dan Hardy t shirts.
Because we did a like a 10 minute countdown show for it.
And I was training at Wildcard at the time just to try and get inside his head.
You know, I'm training a boxing gym, I'm, you know, I'm expecting you to be a boxer.
And I played the game really hard on that fight.
And it was just, it was interesting to see how it played out because of what he expected from me and, and, and, The version of him that I got, right?
And he was so angry at me that his vision was, his mind was clouded.
And even in the, was it the end of the second round, he went back and sat on his stool and it always stuck in my mind, Mark Delagrotti in his corner.
It wasn't advice, it wasn't anything.
He said, You're one round away from shutting this kid up.
It was all about silencing me, putting me in my place.
And then, funnily enough, after that, the next fight was Mike Swick.
For the whole training camp, Mike Swick was like, he was waiting for me to start trash talking.
So I'm like, I'm not going to do it because he's expecting it.
And he'll find it funny.
So it's not going to have any kind of impact.
So I just waited until the press conference and brought him a runner up trophy.
And he was like, I'm bringing this to the cage on fight night and I'm going to give it back to you.
But, you know, but it's interesting to see what you can do, how you can affect people like that and make them act out.
You know, like the countdown show, the very start of it.
It's just hilarious, still in my mind.
Is you've got this whole kind of thing, it's like dimly lit, and Marcus is there, and he's like, You know, when I was a kid, my mum used to say, You can't say you hate this unless you think a little bit about how much you dislike it every day.
And then there was a pause, and the USC nailed it with the editing.
And he looked down the camera and he went, I hate Dan Hardy.
And then it cut to me, and I'm just laughing like a prick, like, You know, like, and I totally got so much hate mail for that fight.
I can't even tell you.
I think I've still got a folder in my old email account because I saved it all.
I wear the meta glasses when I'm doing face offs now, so you can see Pierre Fuller made a little logo, Hardy's Hardy Vision.
Nice, and you can see.
Sometimes people are like face to face, it's palpable, you know.
And and and what I what I always loved when people were cutting weight is you got a far more genuine version of them than the version that was.
I mean, even look at Connor, right?
He was feral at 145, at 155, he was he was cutting, but he was.
On point at 170, he was like, Right, feel great, just a different three different versions of the same person, 10 pounds apart.
Yeah, and when I fought Roy Markham, that was co main event in my second fight in London, UFC 95, he arrived at fight week on the Tuesday at 195 to make 171.
And I knew that it was going to be a rough weight cut for him.
He was a big guy, he was massive, and he'd never been the distance 16 and four.
He was knocked everybody out that he fought.
And I was, do you remember when he fought?
Is it Brody Farber?
Kicked him in the neck.
And, like, as he went down, he crossed his legs on the way down.
That was at the Palms.
And it was just dead at him.
And it was brutal.
But, like, when we did the weigh ins in a theatre in London, and obviously we're all on weight.
I've been on weight since two o'clock, as most people have.
We've journeyed into London on the bus.
Everyone's still on weight, no one's drinking.
And, like, you walk through the changing rooms in the back, and we're in, like, an old West End theatre.
And, like, you can see where people are at, what state they're at, how much they've cut weight.
And I remember seeing Roy Markham just sitting there, just.
He would just look like he was broken already.
He was just so drained and exhausted.
So, my thought to myself is, I'm going to get right in his face as soon as I've stepped off the scales.
And I wanted him to feel that I wasn't as depleted as he was the day before, because that would then be his memory going into the fight on fight days that he didn't cut as much as me.
He didn't feel like shit like I did yesterday.
And as I walked onto the stage, I'm standing on the scales and I'm looking at him.
And there's never a photograph of me looking at the At the crowd and flexing, I'm looking directly at him.
And as soon as they read my weight, I went straight over, I put my forehead on his, and I tried to push him back a step or two.
And that was because we were on weight.
If that was a morning weigh in and we were doing it later in the day, it wouldn't have had the same kind of impact.
And that's a factor that takes so long to catch up to.
Yeah.
God, if you can ever, unless you're like a real superior athlete.
Just a freak athlete.
It's just like someone who's got a gymnastics background or something.
It's like very explosive.
It's so hard to pick up that wrestling later in your career.
It's like, that's what's so crazy about Pereira, is that he figured out how to just stuff everything, like from a multiple champion kickboxing career where he didn't do any grappling at all.
Lost his first MMA fight to submission.
Really couldn't fucking grapple at all.
Gets together with Glover Teixeira and just figured it out.
But I also think with him, it's a freak athlete thing.
But even a freak athlete, though, you take him back 10 years and you take Glover Teixeira away, and he's not supplied with the information where it can apply that athleticism, right?
And this is where former fighters passing on knowledge, like we talked about.
I mean, look, we went Bass Rutten, Dwayne Ludwig, TJ Dillashaw, right?
Glover Teixeira to Alex Pereira is probably one of the best relationships because for me, Glover Teixeira was he overachieved in his career based on his age and his athleticism compared to other people in the division.
The reason why was because his game was so solid and so sound.
I say to young fighters, you need that Glover to share a base level where you can be semi conscious, taking big shots, sweep to top position, take someone's back and choke them out.
He did that consistently.
You get dropped and come back from the dead and finish people.
But that's the thing is like, does he know the whole database of jujitsu?
Does he know everything that a normal black belt would learn?
And I'm not discrediting his black belt, but what I'm saying is his game has been very specifically tailored to be effective in the arena that he's fighting in.
But it's also the relationship that he has with Glover, too, where it's one really elite coach with the world championship level experience concentrating on a very special athlete.
Whereas if you're at ATT, you know, there's fucking Chechens and fucking Dagestanis and just a room full of assassins and there's five coaches.
And like, I don't know if you'd get that kind of attention there.
You know, There's two different schools of thought.
You know, there's the school of thought that you need to be around those people because that's a shark tank and that's how you get better.
You'd be around all these killers.
And then there's the other school of thought is like, no, you're better off at a very small gym with a small group of people that really concentrate on you.
I'm more inclined to think of the small gym.
I think the small gym with elite trainers is a better option than being in a giant.
I mean, it's not that ATT doesn't create amazing world champion athletes, it certainly does.
But I think if someone's coming up, Maybe you're better off with someone like, first of all, you'd have to find someone like Glover who's really interested in taking the time and really working with you.
And Glover, and you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, like Glover's already gone through the process of learning jiu jitsu and absorbing what's useful and rejecting a lot of what's useless.
So, like, I feel like the refinement that Glover Tashira went through to be the great fighter that he was is the reason why Pereira's become so successful because he's been given the pieces that he needs.
And I would imagine that, you know, if you rolled with him, he would be a real problem.
But I would imagine his game's still very direct.
Like, he's not using crackhead control and he's not rolling for knee bars and that kind of thing.
But including some heel hooks and things like that.
Like, there's certain positions where you see guys in jujitsu tournaments, like, boy, you find yourself like that in a fight, that guy's going to blast you in the face.
Like, you're in a bat.
Like, you're grabbing a hold of someone's leg, and your head is right here, and you're hooked.
Like, there is nothing stopping someone from elbowing you or punching you in the face.
See, I often think that I'm quite fortunate that I came into martial arts before MMA.
And the reason for that is because the way that I learned martial arts was not for sport, right?
And this is an observation I've had recently where, you know, a fighter just would fall apart if they don't have a particular person in their corner, right?
My martial arts instructor back in the day from when I was six was teaching me taekwondo or teaching me martial arts, should I say, for him not to be their corner in me.
Because I'm doing it for self defense.
There's no sport context.
He's not teaching me techniques that I can use when he's there to coach me through a street fight, right?
He's trying to give me the techniques that I need.
So when he's not there, I know what I'm doing, right?
Same thing with like spatial awareness.
Like often, like, you know, when I was in clubs and I was fighting a lot back in the day, my awareness of fire exits and tables and that kind of stuff gave me a similar awareness to how I can use the cage against my opponent.
Which I feel is not necessarily used as much as it could be in MMA these days.
Like, there are certain fighters, they just don't.
Like, how often do you see two fighters up against a fence panel and the whole cage is there?
And they're like, they're not, no one's using the pressure that they could be using.
Sometimes people circle themselves onto the fence unnecessarily.
Like, the idea of being backed up against a wall is only if you don't want people attacking you from behind, was my perspective in a self defense context.
So I think the way that I learned martial arts allowed me to kind of see it as a.
In a more efficient way, right?
Like, say, for example, if I'd have learned jujitsu, I wouldn't have wanted to use jujitsu for a street fight because a lot of the street fights I got in, it wasn't one person.
So almost always, when you see one person that is so dominant in wrestling and the other person can't handle it, that's when the fights can sometimes be quite stagnant.
I hear what you're saying totally, but like, say, for example, in the Damian Meyer fight, he defended 26 takedowns in that fight, went the distance, right?
Right, but with the Wonderboy fight, he rocked Wonderboy and he had Wonderboy hurt, where Wonderboy didn't hurt him, which is because he forced Wonderboy to be offensive instead of countering.
But that's the thing, that was a very, very clear one.
Right, where you've got one person moving back and giving the center of the cage, but clearly winning on the striking.
Whereas, if when it gets very even with the striking, you have to really have good judges to be able to pick apart who's landing what.
Yes, even because like we had a fight the other week, Jakub Kasuba, he was fighting Natan Schultz and he was backing up the whole fight, but he was landing way more strikes than his opponent.
But even when it got to the end of the fight, I'm like, are these judges going to score this right?
Are they because they don't have the stats that we have on the screen in front of us, right?
They should, exactly, they should.
But because they don't, are they going to go, oh, well, you know, he was moving forward?
And we had a fight in Sioux Falls the other day where the female fighter, Sharon Bowers, was pushing forward and she was landing, but her opponent was backing up and countering a lot of the shots.
And the judges scored it to Sabrina.
It was, you know, it was the right decision to make.
But the crowd didn't like it because they felt like the Bowers was the one pushing forward and making a fight out of it.
Both of those guys are so elite, and then when they got matched up against each other in their UFC debut, I'm like, Man, people aren't going to realize how good this matchup is, right?
Like Saruki, and I called his debut against this Lakachev.
And like, the difference between like the Pride gloves or the rising gloves, or the like the fear techs.
I always used to use fear techs if I could.
There's a there's a curve in the glove, right?
When you try your gloves on, what the people, what the blue shirts backstage do because they know the game is they roll the glove up and then wrap it with the velcro of the wrist so it stays rolled from Tuesday to Saturday, right?
And then when you get them on Saturday, they've kind of curved a little bit, right?
But it's not the curve is not built into the padding, right?
And the the the the new ones that they made, there was just Too much technology and not enough common sense.
You click on his Instagram, and he's, I mean, in my opinion, he's one of the best strikers in the world right now.
And I've, you know, he trained at Renegade for a long time with the Edwards brothers, and I would watch him just play spar with people, and the level of trickery.
Like, that's where you go back to saying about dimensions, right?
There are rangers in fights, and then there are dimensions in those rangers.
There was a subculture that was growing around the brand.
And there were shows that would host you long enough for you to develop a brand, right?
So, like, I didn't have nearly as big of a following as Conor McGregor or Paddy Pym looked.
But I had a similar platform, right?
I was Cage Warriors champ, then Connor was Cage Warriors champ, and he was an established fighter with a game and a following before he came to the UFC.
Same with Paddy.
We don't see that as much anymore, right?
We don't see the fighters growing on their local scene and building a local fan base that really starts to grow the sport on a grassroots level, you know?
The problem with it was there were a lot of sponsors that weren't paying.
So, a lot of fighters would wind up in lawsuits, and there was a lot of bullshit that was going on.
Some of them were, and it was great.
Yeah.
You know, like, you know, I'm really good friends with Brendan Schaub, and there was a point in time where he was making X amount for a fight, but he was making like three times that in sponsors.
But like if you think about it, like say Air Rake Records, right?
They couldn't afford to pay the UFC $50,000.
They would pay me £300 to have the thing on my banner, right?
So then, as soon as you bring in this, okay, everybody has to pay $50,000 to be a sponsor in the UFC cage, almost all of the sponsors then fell out the market straight away.
And then you've only got a few that are lingering.
And then, if you're a clothing distributor, if you sell a variety of different brands, it was $100,000 that you had to pay.
So if you're MMA Warehouse and you're sponsoring Alistair Overeem, And your sponsorship budget for the year is $250,000, and straight away, $100,000 has been taken out because the UFC needed it.
Just your pool's gone down.
So you've got less money to give to the fighters, and then you're sponsoring less fighters overall.
I get that argument, and I definitely agree about fighter pay.
Like, I'm always in favor of fighters getting paid more.
It's a very dangerous job, and it's the only thing that people are paying to see.
They're not paying to look at the cage, they're not paying to look at the ring card girls, they're not paying to hear me talk.
They're paying to watch the fights.
Fighters should get the majority of the money.
And it is a problem when they don't have leverage.
And I think that it's great that you have things like MVP getting involved with the Netflix card.
And I wish the card was a little stronger, but it's difficult.
Like, like Lynn's fighting against Francis Ngano, like, you know, you need, like, who the fuck is even available that's not signed to a contract that you can get Francis to fight?
Right, because you want to watch one promotion where all the fighters are so you can find out who the best is because that's what ultimately it was about, right?
So I was running PFL Europe for a couple of three years.
I stepped in at the end of 2022 as commentator.
In 2023, I became the head of.
Head of fighter ops for Europe.
So I was doing all the signing and matchmaking.
I only had four shows a year, but I mean, it was a passion project for me to sign all these young guys and match them.
And my argument was every single one, and I always used to say this to the fighters because remember when Dana used to do this back in the old weighing days where he'd get all the fighters, no corner men, no coaches, just translators and the fighters.
And we'd gather in one of the changing rooms in the arena, and Dana would give us this speech, and it was stirring.
Like we were all there to murder each other, but for like five minutes, we all felt like we were in it together.
I loved that feeling.
I missed it.
Even walking out, we're like fist bumping each other and we're all hyped, and that's where he'd announce the bonus amounts and stuff.
So I would do that with PFO Europe.
I'd gather all the fighters together and I'm like, look, there's not a single fight on this card that has been matched for one person to win.
Every single person stepping into the cage has got a fair chance of winning.
Your destiny is in your hands, right?
And with PFO Europe, I was able to build a good roster and to.
I mean, we had some fantastic shows, but when I first inherited it, we had four tournaments, right?
So I had to sign 16 fighters sorry, eight fighters per weight class.
So I had 32 fighters on my roster that was done already before the year started.
And then I'm having to get loads of different flags.
So we're going into a place and I've got a bunch of fighters on the card that I don't need that aren't going to sell any tickets.
And it was just working against me constantly.
So I pushed to go down to two tournaments and have just a normal MMA show for the rest of it.
And that worked out well, but.
They just loved the tournament format because it was a distinguishing factor.
And the question is, you know, what do we have to do to make a difference?
Like, I mean, I think we are doing those, we are making those moves.
We have to make more content, tell the fighters' stories better, for sure.
And it's accommodating fighters that have got two or 300 fights in another discipline that don't want to learn how to wrestle or grapple, but they are.
Yeah, but then also you've got to go into well, did they turn their head?
What was the circumstance of it, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, the thing is, like, you can't, in the rules, you can't strike joints, right?
But then it was the same thing when we had elbows, and I'm like, we're doing shows in France, and I'm saying to the French Commission, We don't have elbows.
And they're like, okay, so where does the elbow start and where does the, you know, where is it for the forearm?
But a thing about like attacking the knees, you would have to say, well, it's got to be a straight kick where you hyperextend the knees because you can't say, don't leg kick the knees because you're going to be able to leg kick the back of the knee always.
If you take that out, you're taking out a giant chunk of all techniques.
But the side kick to the knee, the problem with that is you're going to ruin careers.
Like, there's a lot of guys that are just not the same.
Tiago Silva, I don't think was ever the same after the John Jones fight.