PFL’s Lance Palmer gets $1,000,000, goes to Red Robin

The Professional Fighting League changed the landscape of the MMA world by offering a million dollar prize to the six division winners of the debut season. That amount of money would be life changing for any fighter good enough to win the title. However, it didn’t change life for them all.

Take Team Alpha Male’s Lance Palmer for instance. The newly crowned PFL featherweight season winner got home from New York and headed right back to work. As 50% owner of a plowing company in Ohio, with a big snowstorm hitting the state, Palmer went right back to his side gig.

I guess the saying is that money never sleeps, Palmer said in an interview with FloCombat’s Top Turtle MMA Podcast. A million dollars is a decent amount of money, but not in 2019, so you gotta keep working.

So back to work he went. As he sees it, the amount of money he won is significant, but not enough for him and his family for the rest of his life.

Anybody who says that you can retire or live off of that for the rest of your life, they’re probably living on minimum wage, Palmer said.

Just because he knows he can’t blow his money or sit on it forever doesn’t mean that Palmer hasn’t spent any of it. In fact, when the wire came through, he went out and made a purchase right away – although not a big one.

The wire just came through last Friday after the drug test came back, he said. I just went to Red Robin with one of my buddies and got a couple beers, but right now that’s about it.

Now Palmer waits on May and the start of next PFL season, where he will again be a participant and on level ground with all of his competitors.

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Author Daniel Vreeland is a co-founder of the Top Turtle Podcast, and a brown belt in Jiu-Jitsu at New England Submission Fighting in Amherst, Massachusetts.