Only a handful of people have fought in the UFC and performed in the WWE, including Dan Severn, Ken Shamrock, Brock Lesnar, Ronda Rousey, Cain Velasquez, and CM Punk. The final figure appeared recently on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette, and compared UFC president Dana White with WWE owner Vince McMahon.
I think there’s levels to it, said Punk, as transcribed by Abhinav Kini for The Body Lock. Obviously you can draw that they’re both right wing, the word I’ll use is weirdo, because obviously they vote based on what’s good for their pocketbook.
If I really had to compare and contrast, I would say Dana is more generous. Dana does a lot of stuff for the fighters behind the scenes. I think there’s a lot of locker room money that people don’t know about and he gets a lot of flak for [not paying fighters enough]. That being said, I do also think fighters need to get paid a whole hell of a lot more.
But a lot of that time when he lashes out when people are complaining about pay and unionization, it’s because he knows, ‘hey, I just gave that guy $250,000 under the table’ but you can’t talk about it. But he should still pay people more and fighters need to get together and unionize anyway.
Locker room bonuses don’t appear to be as common as they once were. On his DC & Helwani podcast for ESPN, former champ champ Daniel Cormier said that after his Unanimous Decision loss to Jon Jones at UFC 182 in 2015, White and then UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta gave him a bonus of $1,000,0000. Cormier added that when he fought Anthony “Rumble” Johnson, his purse as $300,000, he got a $300,000 cut of the 300,000 buy pay-per-view, and a locker room bonus of $400,000 to make it an even $1,000,000.
