Don King Looking To Take On UFC

J. Michael Falgoust at USA Today has an interview with Don King in which he discusses his desire to get into MMA promotion:

Your rival Bob Arum has made condescending remarks about MMA, referring to their fan base as too unrefined. Your thoughts?
They are Americans. They are people. Who am I to say that something is wrong with them when I’m always crying about, “Why you’re treating me this way?” They bring competition. They bring people. Let’s enrich it and monetize it. Let’s bring the people something.
When you bring a new store to town, you can choose between the prices and the fabrics. When I bring my guys in we’ll be getting prepared to take on Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta in their league vs. our league. The same thing I want to do with the sport of boxing I want to do with MMA. Make it competitive, man. Make it a comparison. Even though they’ve put on good fights, let’s see what they do with someone totally independent.

What they do with someone totally independent to this point has been to render them more or less unable to compete. I have no doubt that Don would want to follow the boxing model and pay extreme amounts of money to stars to get them on board with him. Obviously the first step is signing these stars so that he has names that can draw in viewers but MMA is more driven by the show as a whole than any true superstar.

Yes, a superstar will improve the PPV buyrate from 400k to 800k but it takes a full card of legitimate fights to make the sport work at the highest level. That is where King’s plan would likely fall apart. I could see him trying to put on an event with a superstar fighting on the top and then a bunch of fights that belong on a regional event as the undercard and expecting it to work like what happens in boxing where Oscar / Pacquiao can be held with a garbage undercard and still sell.

The boxing model won’t work for MMA and MMA fans need to hope Don doesn’t ruin the way the sport is ran by holding a couple events which destroy the MMA payscale.