Bjorn Rebney: I didn’t get into this to be #2
Sportsnet.ca conducted an exclusive interview with Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney recently that touched on a wide variety of subjects, including…
Sportsnet.ca conducted an exclusive interview with Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney recently that touched on a wide variety of subjects, including how he would fight UFC President Dana White if the two met in the cage.
I don’t know. That’s a great question, said Rebney. My understanding is he’s got a great standup game. My standup game isn’t that great. I’d probably go right back into a pre-production meeting and try to compete where the competition is ripe, which is putting on live events and putting on great TV shows.
I think he’s a very charismatic figure who has driven a lot of consumer connectivity to the game. He has a very big personality, which draws a lot of attention to mixed martial arts, which is not a bad thing, and I respect the fact that when he first started doing it and the UFC first started launching in terms of a general market crossover, nobody was listening.
From what I’ve seen and I’ve never spent any time around him, he looks amazingly driven, hugely focused and he looks to be an amazing fan of the game.
There’s no way to survive and be successful in this type of business if you’re anything less than on. We have no off-season. It never stops. You’re constantly marketing and promoting and publicizing, selling and talking. If you’re not pleasantly relentless, not aggressive in pursuit of making it bigger and better and more exciting, need five days off to do this or that, this isn’t the place for you.
“I sleep 4½ hours a night and I’m fine with it. I only sleep that amount of time because there’s a huge amount of stuff I need to get done. I don’t take days off.
I’m a fan and I watch some of the UFC shows because there’s great fighters I want to see fight, and then part of it is to track what the competition is doing in terms of their numbers and how people are responding and what they’re doing live-wise and internationally, where their distribution is.”
I used to watch Royce Gracie fight in the UFC. I was one of those freaks who watched Pride events when they were still huge and drawing huge numbers to the Tokyo Dome. It was what I did for fun. I would go to shows in Southern California and I would get together with buddies and drink cheap beer and get pizza and watch the UFC shows, but nobody knew what it was.
I’d get 100 buddies together to watch football and I’d talk about MMA and there was no true connectivity to the market. Everybody else saw the Ultimate Fighter when it launched on Spike and said, ‘That was kind of cool.’ I was checking the (overnight ratings). The numbers came in and they were huge. I was the only person who wasn’t surprised.
I’ve got a lot of respect for what the UFC has done. They’ve accomplished some great things. My anticipation of where we go is pretty large. When I was envisioning this, I never did get into it thinking, ‘I hope we’re number two.’ I don’t think anybody that’s hugely driven gets into any business and says, ‘I just hope we can be number two.’
Your vision is that you’re going to put all these pieces together and over a period of time you’re going to be competitive with the best that there is, regardless of what you’re doing, and my vision is no different than that.