Funky: My Defiant Path Through the Wild World of Combat Sports by Ben Askren

Author:Ben Askren [Askren, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637583005
Publisher: Permuted Platinum
Published: 2022-08-09T14:31:53+00:00

CHAPTER SIX:

UFC

“I have a friend that told me my power was my influence and I said, ‘My power is to not be influenced.’”

—Kanye West

Everyone was wondering if I was headed to the UFC, which made the most logical sense. That’s where “the best fighters in the world” were, as Dana White was so fond of telling everyone. In the previous months, Bellator had lost a couple of its free-agent champions to the UFC, including Héctor Lombard and lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez—and both situations were a little messy. With Héctor, the UFC was forced to overpay to dissuade Bellator from matching, and numbers were revealed to the public.

When Eddie signed with the UFC during his own free agency, Bellator exercised that same “matching” clause in his contract after the period of exclusive negotiation, which kicked up a shitstorm. Settlement meetings were held. Eddie got vocal in the media about the situation. Veteran fighters, seeing the money he was being offered from the UFC (not to mention the pay-per-view points), got pissed off. Eddie got sued by Bellator and found himself not only caught in a contract dispute, but ultimately back with the promotion. Begrudgingly he had to return for two more fights, which ended up being one.57 It made for a lot of bad feelings between fans and Bellator.

I didn’t want any of that to happen. Neither did Bellator or the UFC, which hated when information on fighter pay became public. The matching clause was a problem that I needed to figure out before doing anything.

In truth, I genuinely believed I was headed to the UFC. At this point, I was undefeated, a perfect 12–0, vocal, polarizing, dismissive of certain media,58 smug, confident, cocky, and all kinds of other adjectives that got thrown around in the media. That I was a dominant champion was all that truly mattered. Yet I was also disinterested in kowtowing to promoters who tried to govern and control fighters. I needed to be who I was, and I wasn’t going to let Dana White or anybody change that. I’ve never cared for liars, which is tough because the best liars in the sport are the ones at the top.

I had already poked the bear a fair amount by the time I reached free agency in the summer of 2013. I’d called Dana White a fat, bald liar (or something to that effect) on Twitter, and—for a guy so often accused of not having any stand-up—I never pulled any punches with my opinions.

Dana didn’t care for me, but there was a bit of foreshadowing involved, too, which I really had nothing (everything) to do with.59 The MMA site Sherdog had put out a feature article about me as a prospect around 2009, which ran right in the heart of fight week for a UFC event. Dana saw that and, for some petty reason, lost his mind. The audacity of an MMA site running an article that had nothing to do with his upcoming event! Dana believed that

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