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Minn. gov’t shutdown nearly stops EC 188

A 20-day state government shutdown in Minnesota — which ended this week with the signing of a $35.7 billion budget…

Chris Palmquist

July 22, 2011 · 4 min read

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A 20-day state government shutdown in Minnesota — which ended this week with the signing of a $35.7 billion budget — made national headlines, and put in jeopardy Monte Cox’s Extreme Challenge 188 Larson vs. Davila on Saturday at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

Even though we were told that it was OK and our event was approved, we then were told about three weeks ago — July 1 is when it started — by the commission, ‘Hey, if this shutdown doesn’t end, the commission will not be working and they won’t let us have a show,’ Cox told Sherdog.com. As it got closer and closer, it started to get pretty hairy. We got to last week, and there was no meeting set for last week.

They were hoping for Monday, and then Tuesday. Finally, on Wednesday, they got the thing back together. We got a call from the commissioner, and he said our event’s good to go — only three days before the show.

We kept going as if there was no doubt we were going to have the show. We did our advertising the same and everything like that. Definitely, people were more hesitant to buy tickets, waiting to see what was going to happen. From what I’m being told, around 2,600 [tickets have been sold]. We were hoping to be around 3,000 [by now] and end up at 4,000. That was kind of our goal. Now, we’re more likely to end up at 3,000 or 3,500.

You know how MMA is now. All the smaller shows around the area — promoters for those shows — they were all out spreading the rumors we were going to get shut down, all counterproductive. So we kind of got off to a slow start. We’re hoping here in the final week that everything will pick up and everything will be fine.

What are you going to do? The deposit on the arena is done, the advertising is spent, the posters are purchased, the fliers are done, the plane tickets … all that stuff is done, so holding on until the very end doesn’t add anything. You can maybe cancel your commercials and get $500 back, but there really is no reason to pull the plug.”

We just crossed our fingers.”

In Illinois two years ago, we had a deal where we had three shows that were already done. One was a casino show that was already sold out, and the commission came down with a decision that they were going to take a month to two months off to re-evaluate what they were doing and weren’t going to sanction any shows through that time. We had to cancel our shows, and it cost us a lot of money.

A lot of other promoters, especially the smaller ones, went ahead and did their shows. When the commission came back, they fined them, but they fined them, like, $2500. Well, crap, I would rather have been fined $2500. I learned from that. You don’t always gain from doing the right thing.

I run a company. I have seven people that work for my company. They rely on the company to make money to live on. When [what happened in Illinois] happens, it’s real frustrating. It’s tough on them. It’s tough on the company, but there isn’t a whole heck of a lot that you can do.

I’ve done almost 700 shows, so I’m not learning much anymore. It’s hard to run into something that I haven’t run into after 700 shows, but you definitely learn not to get nervous and not to panic and overthink it. You keep concentrating on doing the right things and just hope it works out.