Kennedy: MMAAA fighter organizing is not simple

Mixed martial arts has reached mainstream sports status. It is, if fact, the biggest driver worldwide of pay-per-view television buys. However, unlike mainstream sports like football, baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, and golf, MMA does not have a players association or union.

In 2009 Robert Maysey founded the MMAFA, which seeks to extend the Muhammad Ali Act to mixed martial arts. Their aim is to keep fighters as independent contractors, establish an independent sanctioning and ranking system, and then let the free market do its thing. If you want to have champion Conor McGregor fight #1 contender Khabib Nurmagomedov, then promoters bid for the right, and whoever offers the highest purse gets to put on the fight. A bill supported by Congressman and retired fighter Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) is currently before the house now. The MMAFA is also extremely supportive of the Federal anti-trust suit against the UFC, which is ongoing.

In August of 2016, baseball agent Jeff Borris established the PFA; he seeks to have UFC fighters reclassified as employees from their current independent contractor status, and form a union. He had said there would be a fighter board in place shortly, but later amended that, saying he did not want to offer names, for fear of retaliation. His most high profile fighter, Leslie Smith, apologized for introducing him to other fighters and severed ties, over a perceived violation of privacy. His attorney too severed ties. Borris flatly denied leaking any fighter support information. But little has been heard from him in year. You can presumably stick a fork in Jeff Borris, or a baseball.

In November of 2016, a group of five fighters announced the formation of the MMAAA, which seeks to form a players association exclusively of UFC fighters, and then petition the league for a 600% increase in the amount of revenue that goes to fighters. The route to the raise was described as a strategy that had to remain secret. The groups funding was also described as a secret. It is widely believed that the MMAAA is financed by CAA, Pepsi to UFC owners WEM-IMG’s Coke. And it is widely believed that it was created by Bjorn Rebney, not known as a progressive promoter. At all.

Tim Kennedy has emerged as a sometimes spokesperson for the effort, while the other fighters, Donald Cerrone, TJ Dillashaw, Georges St-Pierre, Cain Velasquez, have been less vocal. Dillashaw even said he may have been led down the wrong path.

During a recent interview with Submission Radio, Kennedy said that a year on, he is still in the fight.

“We… we’re persevering,” he said. “You know, resilience… It’s still going. And it’s, as you can imagine, especially dealing with IMG and UFC and Dana, it’s not just an easy thing that just happens. So we’re struggling through the process and doing all the right things and trying to make all of the right decisions, and man, they’re hard.

It’s always been an uphill battle, and the need is there. I just read an article this week about how we’re at a point where maybe fighters and athletes don’t even need managers – I think Ben Fowlkes wrote it – and that scares the crap out of me, where we’re at a point where athletes are so completely controlled and their income is so dictated to them that they don’t really need representation anymore, they are just at the whims of the promotion, and that is frightening, that you can’t really have sponsors anymore in the cage unless it’s UFC sponsor and they’re making 90 percent of the revenue, and the money that you’re going to make in the fight is going to be dictated, there’s no negotiation unless you have some amazing card up your sleeve like Conor that has a trick every time. But it’s scary, man. It needs to happen and it has to happen, but man, it is a fight.

I think 60 percent of the roster is directly talking to us.

“I talked to, as you can imagine, hundreds of athletes contact me it seems like every month and with like a pleading and imploring, ‘What is happening?’, ‘How can this move forward?’ And it’s not just as simple as, okay we have the majority of the roster signed to us so this is what we’re going to do. It’s not that simple. It takes, man, the strategic planning of making one press announcement because if you say one wrong thing, everything can be lost, and the thing that can be lost is an opportunity for these athletes to be protected. So that’s a big thing.

Kennedy has a message to the roster.

You’re not alone,” he said. “There are hundreds of other people like you that are struggling, both economically and physically, and that there’s people like me that have your best interest in mind and that we’re trying to figure out what the best solution is. And I’m not one who just kind of quits, so I’m just gonna keep working at it.

The initial announcement of the MMAAA was a disaster because, in two words, Bjorn Rebney. Kennedy was asked if there hasn’t been another press conference in a year because the first one suffered a backlash over Rebney and the desire not to repeat any mistakes.

Absolutely,” he said. “You know, the first announcement was with the best intention but poorly thought through and we took a lot of hits for how we did it, where we did it, when we did it, who was part of it, and those are mistakes you can’t afford to make.