In late 2016, five well-known MMA athletes and former Bellator owner Bjorn Rebney launched one of the last major attempts to bring UFC athletes together under a united front. These five UFC athletes, Georges St-Pierre (Cain Velasquez), Donald Cerrone and T.J. Dillashaw were some of the most prominent in their respective sports at the time. Their efforts were called the Mixed Martial Arts Athletes Association.
“Every time we fight, we’re afraid,” St-Pierre said in the group’s introductory media call. This is a new fight. I know a lot of us are afraid. It’s time to step up, do the right thing.”
“It’s time to stand together.”
The group received mixed reactions from the MMA community. While the first was due to Rebney’s involvement in the event, excitement was generated by the fact that UFC fighters such as St-Pierre and Velasquez had not publicly supported a unionization initiative.
However, that early excitement didn’t last. Within a week, Cerrone walked back some of his support for the movement, telling reporters during UFC 206 fight week that he’d spoken to UFC president Dana White and hadn’t exactly understood what he was signing up for. As time moved on, more cracks continued to appear within the organization, with the MMAAA having little action or results to show for its efforts. By May 2017, Dillashaw and others were publicly bemoaning whether they had been led down the wrong path.
Ultimately, the organization and its initial optimism died a quick and unceremonious death.
What actually happened to the MMAAA in reality? Why didn’t the group succeed?
Former board member Kennedy addressed the topic Wednesday on The MMA Hour.
“We needed athletes to agree to be part of this association, this union,” Kennedy explained during an in-studio appearance on The MMA Hour. Dana White is so in control of these athletes that I told Kennedy, “You must sign that you are a member of this association, then we will all come back together to address healthcare, mental and TBI CTE. But we’ll all do this together.” Only five percent would agree to this.
” They all said they wanted to. The major fight camps told us to sign the document. There was no other information than that it said “I will be a member of this organization.” It was so fearful of what the consequences would be that we didn’t do it. It was that way it ended. So the guys that you saw as the face of it, there were those [five], and then there were about another 25 [athletes who signed on with us], and then we had a roster of 500 that didn’t.”
Kennedy, 42, retired from active competition in early 2017 following a 15-year MMA career that saw him fight for virtually every major North American promotion of his era, from the UFC and Strikeforce to the IFL and WEC. His experiences gave him perspective on what life was like both inside the UFC and outside of it, and though he’s now shifted to a different phase of his career — Kennedy is currently promoting his new book Scars and Stripes, which documents his extensive military career as well as his MMA run — he remains a fan of the sport he competed in for nearly two decades.
And he’s disturbed by what he sees.
“Athletes are making less money comparatively [than when I was fighting]. Everything’s bigger, except for the fighter pay,” Kennedy said.
“It is such an insult. This is not fair to expect these men to sacrifice their lives for their sport. As anyone who has been around the sport for a while knows, athletes are broken. There are lots of athletes, their cognitive decline from how they performed in the ring. Physically, orthopedically, I’m sure if you watched Mark [Coleman] or Dan Henderson try to walk around. Jake Shields is able to get on the mat and still move — right? — but then he comes out and you’re just like, ‘Bro, what was this sport done to you? And at what cost?’ You look at golf, this last golf [news cycle], a guy just signed $120 million one-year contract. He’s getting $2 million every time he plays golf.
“The last-place worst player on the green is making $250,000. This is golf. And these guys [in MMA] are going out and they’re looking like this? This is such an awful tragedy. Kennedy said that collective bargaining is not the solution to this problem.
“You had the best fight of the night and you can’t buy an electric car. Like, that’s how insulting it is. A guy from the NFL goes to his mother and gets that little NFL bump. An 18-year-old goes and gets signed, goes to play football for three years, and he goes and plays for insert-any-football-team, and he’s buying his whole entire family houses. Then you have the UFC fighter, who ranks amongst the top five worldwide — five. He can barely afford rent. Sometimes he sleeps on the floor of the gym, and he cannot even go to a fight camp. The agent takes a portion, IRS takes another percentage and there are no sponsors. It’s all managed by UFC and the poor man or woman is barely making ends meet. You fans are shameful. You should all be discussing this .”
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Kennedy took particular umbrage with a narrative commonly used online that frames the fighter pay debate as “X fighter made Y amount of money for 15 minutes of work,” using the example of Paddy Pimblett’s recent $24,000 paycheck for his win at UFC London as a case study for what fans are missing when they reduce the conversation into such simple terms.
“Let me kick you in the head for like eight months out of the year for that $80,000, and then give your 20 percent to your agent, and then 40 percent to give to the IRS, and then make sure you pay for gym fees, make sure you pay for your gear, make sure you try and get organic food — there’s nothing left,” Kennedy said. “There’s nothing left.
“It was a lifetime [of preparation]. [Pimblett] has been a master martial artist for how long? It was six years ago that he started martial arts. He’s been doing this his whole entire life. Like, when you’re trying to learn how to ride a bike, he was out there being a martial artist. So that two minutes was really like 22 [years]. I don’t know how old he is.”
The battle for fighter’s rights in MMA is ultimately one that Kennedy isn’t a part of anymore. Kennedy is busy enough with his post-MMA retirement. But it’s still a cause he holds near and dear to his heart, and he hopes the goals of the MMAAA are achieved one day in the future, if only for the sake of the athletes who put their lives on the line.
” I pray it does,” Kennedy stated. “They deserve that it does.”
