ATT owner details trying to buy UFC, twice
“It may have stayed around, but it would have been on a very, very, very small scale. I just didn’t want to see it go out of business. I wanted a place for our guys to fight.”
After the Battle for Britain, Sir Winston Churchill famously intoned “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” ATT owner Dan Lambert is on the short list of people who have most contributed to the field of mixed martial arts, and with little fanfare, too.
Lambert appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, said he was in negotiations to buy the UFC, twice. In 2001, he even put a deposit down with then owner SEG, with a closing date scheduled. And during the pre TUF days when things were not working out for ZUFFA, Lambert again entered into negotiations for the league.
With characteristic modesty, Lambert said things worked out for the best.
“If it ever comes up, the only thing I think is how fortunate all the fighters and managers and fans are that it ended up the way it did, in the hands of the guys it was,” said Lambert as transcribed by Marc Raimondi for MMAFighting.com. “They put a ton of time and a ton of money and ate a lot of losses before it turned around. I’d love to think of what the business was back then and how the fighters survived back then and then I look at how many people have jobs and make livings now and pretty decent ones at times based on that.”
“It may have stayed around, but it would have been on a very, very, very small scale. I just didn’t want to see it go out of business. I wanted a place for our guys to fight.”
The hotel executive said he never got his deposit back from SEG and Bob Meyerowitz, and took them to court. However, ATT fighter Robbie Lawler is fighting for the world title on Saturday, and the $40,000,000 that ZUFFA had lost on the UFC is now worth some number of billions.
“It was kind of a disaster that worked out pretty well for everyone in the end,” said Lambert, accurately.