Opinion: Stakes Are High(er)
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company,
Evolve Media.
* * *
Scott Coker is undeniably one of the most successful combat sports
promoters in history. If you're an avid MMA fan, even if you fell
in love with the sport in 2013, after Zuffa's -- excuse me, Forza's
-- purchase of Strikeforce, you know what the “Scott Coker model”
is all about. This Saturday, inside the renovated walls of “The
World's Most Famous Arena,” Madison Square Garden, Coker is taking
his well-established blueprint to pay-per-view with Bellator
180. It's an old maxim to never forget “what brought you to the
dance,” but despite all of his noteworthy successes over the years,
does the Coker model have the footwork to shine on PPV?
June 18 -- literally less than a week ago -- marked three years for Coker at the helm of the sport's No. 2 promotion, a role that, bittersweet or not, has defined him professionally: the earnest, clever but not-quite-good-enough little brother of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Not that three years is an eternity or anything, but that number surprises me and it may surprise you, as well. Maybe it's that there's so much MMA now worldwide -- not just between the UFC and Bellator MMA but a myriad of promotions putting their product on cable, UFC Fight Pass or just streaming it internationally themselves -- that our perception of time versus “fight time” is skewed. I would posit something different, however: Strikeforce's importance to the contemporary MMA scene still resounds heavily, plus Coker has spent the last three years molding what was once Bellator founder Bjorn Rebney's vision into his own; and by “his own,” I mean Strikeforce.
Let there be no question: From November 1999, when Kazushi Sakuraba turned a dwarfed Royler Gracie's shoulder inside-out and showed Japan that Gracies could be beaten, until 2006, when Japanese tabloid Shukan Gendai's detailing of the promotion's underworld connections caused its implosion, Pride was the best MMA organization in the world, maybe even by a standard deviation or two. However, Pride was never actually competing with the UFC for anything except talent and the hearts and minds of the, at the time, minuscule hardcore MMA fanbase. The UFC was trying to use the likes of Carmen Electra to sell cagefighting -- you know, that sport where people fight until they die, right? -- to an unwitting and uneducated audience, and it was trying to do it on PPV. Meanwhile, Pride staged its debut in the middle of a red-hot pro wrestling climate. Fans had just spent years anticipating and then witnessing "wrasslers" against real shoot-style wrestlers, coming to a head with the record-smashing New Japan Pro-Wrestling versus Union of Wrestling Forces International. Shooto was on the way up, Pancrase was appointment viewing for wrestling nerds who didn't even like “No Holds Barred fighting” and Akira Maeda's Rings was beginning to really blossom, integrating legitimate fights into its worked-shoot style.
Like I said, the UFC was trying to sell its product on PPV to an audience that had abandoned the sport as a fad back in 1994. Meanwhile, Pride was on network television in Japan, where cable isn't nearly as developed a concept; there's only seven national broadcasters and only four of them matter. If we are to be precise, it wasn't Shukan Gendai's expose campaign against Pride that killed the company but rather the bad publicity itself, not for Pride but for broadcast partner Fuji TV. Even with all the dirty money and gang activity in the world, Pride would have trudged on at least for another few years beyond 2007 if the company didn't lose its TV patronage. While Pride events were available on SkyPerfecTV live, most events were broadcast in a slightly tape delayed, largely edited format on Fuji TV, yet still routinely grabbed 10-20 million viewers. It it estimated Pride received $50 million per year from Fuji directly at a time where that sort of money in the MMA game was beyond astronomical.
What does any of this have to do with Coker, apart from the man's obvious, ongoing affinity for that particular bygone MMA era? Truly, considering the nature of the UFC-versus-Pride era is important in breaking down his actual successes as a promoter. This November, we will mark 25 years since UFC 1, the dawn of MMA's pioneering era. Since the moment Bill “Superfoot” Wallace belched during the live intro to its first card, the UFC has dominated the global MMA space, save for the moment in time that Pride had cultural and financial advantages in every conceivable way. In the wake of Pride and the company's sale, standard MMA wisdom says that a slew of well-intentioned, heavily monetized start-ups tried to take on the UFC and failed: Affliction, Elite XC, the International Fight League and so on.
Casual wisdom, of course, is wrong on one particular. For whatever reason, the collective MMA hive mind tends to lump Strikeforce in with these other companies, which is completely irrational. Strikeforce's breakout moment was when Coker and his partners, then known as Silicon Valley Sports Entertainment, bought out EliteXC, its contracts and tape library. When that watershed moment happened in February 2009, the IFL had already been out of business for nine months and Affliction had already run what ultimately would be its last event. We casually consider “UFC vs. Pride” to be at bare minimum a six-year business struggle that dictated the direction of this sport, despite Pride essentially pinch-hitting from third base against an inferior opponent. Weirdly, “UFC vs. Strikeforce” has yet to be canonized as a legitimate historical epoch, which grossly discredits Coker as a promoter.
Yes, we all know Strikeforce as an MMA promotion, but it started as a kickboxing outfit in 1985. Somehow, Coker was able to transform this brand, first into cagefighting company, then into the West's leading regional promotion, then into a bona fide UFC contender and, whether you were a fan or fighter, an alternative. While he may have had help from SVSE money and a broadcast partner like Showtime, what Coker did with Strikeforce is truly one of the most remarkable, impressive feats in the history of promoting human beings fighting. Coker took a kickboxing promotion founded in 1985, sparsely ever utilizing that brand, and over a decade later shocked the world by turning out an MMA card headlined by Frank Shamrock and Cesar Gracie. It wasn't the first sanctioned MMA card in California, but it was the first major one.
In trademark Coker fashion, he got away with a bit of sleight of hand, too: Shamrock was his guy and had a beef with Gracie, who, despite having perhaps the extended Gracie family's most prodigious mouth, had zero MMA qualifications. Somehow, at the 11th hour, the California State Athletic Commission drummed up a clandestine record that suggested Gracie was 14-0 in vale tudo rules bouts and allowed him to face a legitimate MMA legend. Shamrock laid him out in 20 seconds. Less than three years later, Coker was buying the EliteXC vestiges, contracts and tapes, turning his cute little San Jose, California, regional promotion into the UFC's top competitor for nearly four years. He signed away top talent from the UFC like Dan Henderson and acquired free agents like Fedor Emelianenko. Yes, these are precisely the heavy-spending moves that ultimately led SVSE to divest in Strikeforce and resulted in the sale to the UFC, but they're also the moves that made Strikeforce into more than some prospect-building feeder league. They're the moves that allowed Coker to become, in the post-Pride era, the only man to legitimately and meaningfully challenge the UFC in any way whatsoever; and unlike during the Pride era, Coker was coming from the underdog position.
However, Coker has had advantages in terms of the business logistics with both Strikeforce and Bellator. As I've detailed in past, Coker's only goal with Showtime was to increase paying subscriptions and turn decent ratings; with Spike, it's now simply trying to court 800,000 to one million viewers per show. Bellator 180 is something different. Coker has one experience with pay-per-view ever, the EliteXC-Strikeforce joint promotion for Shamrock-Phil Baroni, which did an estimated 30,000-40,000 buys. Bellator's first PPV, while corrupted by the dissolution of the Eddie Alvarez-Michael Chandler rubber match, was able to lean on the still-strong drawing power of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. Bellator 120 did an estimated 100,000 buys, but internally, Spike execs pegged the number higher and were largely enthusiastic and excited about the numbers the company did on PPV the first time, especially given the circumstances.
It is in this PPV promotion that the limitations of the Coker model come to the forefront. Promoting an event that by design asks consumers to part with their money? Maybe you want a more fired-up figurehead than Coker mumbling out “We'll have an announcement about that next week.” Chael Sonnen and Wanderlei Silva may draw a hot cable rating, but will folks pay for it? It's not just that both men are broken down shells of their former, steroid-infused selves, but they're clearly going through the motions on a non-physical level. Silva skipped a promotional event because he claims he was worried he would hit Sonnen, yet when they came face-to-face at the Thursday presser, Silva gave Sonnen the weakest, most perfunctory push to the chest you've ever seen, answered by the worst “Hold me back, bro!” routine you've ever seen from Sonnen. Remember when Jackson got in the ring in Pride and called out Silva? Remember when Silva shoved him, for real, while screaming “My belt! My belt!”? This was the complete opposite of that. Sonnen even went on Twitter after and unleashed a canned line about Silva being on his back like a Kardashian during the fight. Maybe it's actually 2007 still and I didn't notice.
The Coker repertoire is proven on premium and regular cable, but PPV is different fundamentally. Does someone want to shell out money to see Coker's boilerplate? Bellator 180 has nearly all relevant hands on deck -- three title fights and a ton of notable names -- but is that a PPV draw? I have no idea; we have no idea. Sonnen was only ever a PPV draw in a specific, Anderson Silva-related context, and that was seven years ago. The fight week promotion for this card has been terrible and smacks of how TV-centric Coker's model has been for years, relying on folks who either were going to watch already or would be incidentally seduced by fights while flicking channels. Coker, alongside his homies at the American Kickboxing Academy, have a track record of developing truly great fighters from the ground up, like Daniel Cormier and Luke Rockhold, but even if Aaron Pico goes on to become the most brilliant fighter we've ever seen, is that a consumer hook? Unlikely.
Pay-per-view is technically not a new frontier for Coker, but it really is when you get down to it. While he may be one of the greatest, shrewdest promoters we have ever seen, his style and tactics are entirely geared towards producing a certain kind of TV product that is magnetic to both diehard fight fans and casual TV clickers. While the standards for “success” are much different between the promotions, the UFC is struggling in this moment -- after Ronda Rousey and more or less after Conor McGregor -- to turn satisfactory PPV numbers. Bellator 180 needs to pass 100,000 buys to be considered a success on any level and that's achievable, but it's not some foregone conclusion, especially without a "Rampage" Jackson to cling to, and it's hard to deny that the Coker model, while perfect for weekly TV promotions, lacks in many of the capacities that we expect when it comes to promoting a PPV event. Phil Davis and Ryan Bader are going to potentially -- probably -- fight five boring rounds on Spike to lead into the PPV, to presumably entice people to buy it; this isn't exactly Leonard Garcia-Chan Sung Jung leading into WEC 48.
Even if Bellator 180 turns out to be a smashing success, it doesn't change things. Every MMA company wants to be on PPV because that's where the real money sits; Bellator and Viacom both want more of these events. Even if Coker's model proves to draw this time around, it doesn't alter the fact that a main event with washed-up former stars going through the rote motions of fight promotion and pretending to hate each other is a much harder sell in this venue than when it's just sitting there on cable, one or two remote control presses away. If Bellator 180 performs beyond expectations, Coker and Viacom should still thank their lucky stars and immediately start thinking about how promoting the next PPV could be better. The growing pains are obvious.
Still, there are worse problems to have. In the post-Pride era, every UFC competitor has died and no one other than Coker has ever been able to meaningfully challenge the throne. The fact that Bellator is in this position at all is a testament to the work of Rebney, Viacom and especially Coker, but the rules of engagement -- and more importantly success -- are different in this context. Can Coker's model work? I don't know. I guess I'll have an announcement about that in a week or two.
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June 18 -- literally less than a week ago -- marked three years for Coker at the helm of the sport's No. 2 promotion, a role that, bittersweet or not, has defined him professionally: the earnest, clever but not-quite-good-enough little brother of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Not that three years is an eternity or anything, but that number surprises me and it may surprise you, as well. Maybe it's that there's so much MMA now worldwide -- not just between the UFC and Bellator MMA but a myriad of promotions putting their product on cable, UFC Fight Pass or just streaming it internationally themselves -- that our perception of time versus “fight time” is skewed. I would posit something different, however: Strikeforce's importance to the contemporary MMA scene still resounds heavily, plus Coker has spent the last three years molding what was once Bellator founder Bjorn Rebney's vision into his own; and by “his own,” I mean Strikeforce.
If you were to write the comprehensive history of this sport,
there's no way to write it without Coker as a major player. If you
made a historical MMA television drama, even from an unabashed
pro-UFC perspective, Coker would be introduced as a secondary
character several cycles in, then transform into the villainous
foil for the next few seasons. Yes, “UFC vs. Pride Fighting
Championships” is the inter-promotional war that still defines both
the historic and modern character of this sport, but Pride has been
dead for over a decade now. Speaking of the creeping-yet-rapid
passage of time. However, Pride had a million built-in advantages
that thrust the organization to the forefront of the MMA world.
When Pride 1 happened with the iconic Rickson
Gracie-Nobuhiko
Takada showdown, the UFC was firmly in its destitute “Dark Age”
era, years removed from widespread PPV access, while the Gracies
and shoot-style professional wrestling were all the rage in Japan.
Even before New Jersey signed off on the Unified Rules in September
2000, Pride had already staged its milestone first Grand Prix, the
event that brought MMA into modernity. When Zuffa was losing money
on every PPV, Pride was enjoying the kakutogi boom, making
money hand over fist, even cooperating with rival promotion K-1 in
August 2002 to stage the “Shockwave” card, which still holds the
attendance record for MMA. Plus, whether it was the KRS era or the
Dream Stage Entertainment era, Pride was propped up and backed
financially by the criminal underworld. With all due respect to the
Fertitta family's history in Galveston, Texas, and Sin City,
Lorenzo and Frank the Third don't quite measure up that way.
Let there be no question: From November 1999, when Kazushi Sakuraba turned a dwarfed Royler Gracie's shoulder inside-out and showed Japan that Gracies could be beaten, until 2006, when Japanese tabloid Shukan Gendai's detailing of the promotion's underworld connections caused its implosion, Pride was the best MMA organization in the world, maybe even by a standard deviation or two. However, Pride was never actually competing with the UFC for anything except talent and the hearts and minds of the, at the time, minuscule hardcore MMA fanbase. The UFC was trying to use the likes of Carmen Electra to sell cagefighting -- you know, that sport where people fight until they die, right? -- to an unwitting and uneducated audience, and it was trying to do it on PPV. Meanwhile, Pride staged its debut in the middle of a red-hot pro wrestling climate. Fans had just spent years anticipating and then witnessing "wrasslers" against real shoot-style wrestlers, coming to a head with the record-smashing New Japan Pro-Wrestling versus Union of Wrestling Forces International. Shooto was on the way up, Pancrase was appointment viewing for wrestling nerds who didn't even like “No Holds Barred fighting” and Akira Maeda's Rings was beginning to really blossom, integrating legitimate fights into its worked-shoot style.
Like I said, the UFC was trying to sell its product on PPV to an audience that had abandoned the sport as a fad back in 1994. Meanwhile, Pride was on network television in Japan, where cable isn't nearly as developed a concept; there's only seven national broadcasters and only four of them matter. If we are to be precise, it wasn't Shukan Gendai's expose campaign against Pride that killed the company but rather the bad publicity itself, not for Pride but for broadcast partner Fuji TV. Even with all the dirty money and gang activity in the world, Pride would have trudged on at least for another few years beyond 2007 if the company didn't lose its TV patronage. While Pride events were available on SkyPerfecTV live, most events were broadcast in a slightly tape delayed, largely edited format on Fuji TV, yet still routinely grabbed 10-20 million viewers. It it estimated Pride received $50 million per year from Fuji directly at a time where that sort of money in the MMA game was beyond astronomical.
What does any of this have to do with Coker, apart from the man's obvious, ongoing affinity for that particular bygone MMA era? Truly, considering the nature of the UFC-versus-Pride era is important in breaking down his actual successes as a promoter. This November, we will mark 25 years since UFC 1, the dawn of MMA's pioneering era. Since the moment Bill “Superfoot” Wallace belched during the live intro to its first card, the UFC has dominated the global MMA space, save for the moment in time that Pride had cultural and financial advantages in every conceivable way. In the wake of Pride and the company's sale, standard MMA wisdom says that a slew of well-intentioned, heavily monetized start-ups tried to take on the UFC and failed: Affliction, Elite XC, the International Fight League and so on.
Casual wisdom, of course, is wrong on one particular. For whatever reason, the collective MMA hive mind tends to lump Strikeforce in with these other companies, which is completely irrational. Strikeforce's breakout moment was when Coker and his partners, then known as Silicon Valley Sports Entertainment, bought out EliteXC, its contracts and tape library. When that watershed moment happened in February 2009, the IFL had already been out of business for nine months and Affliction had already run what ultimately would be its last event. We casually consider “UFC vs. Pride” to be at bare minimum a six-year business struggle that dictated the direction of this sport, despite Pride essentially pinch-hitting from third base against an inferior opponent. Weirdly, “UFC vs. Strikeforce” has yet to be canonized as a legitimate historical epoch, which grossly discredits Coker as a promoter.
Yes, we all know Strikeforce as an MMA promotion, but it started as a kickboxing outfit in 1985. Somehow, Coker was able to transform this brand, first into cagefighting company, then into the West's leading regional promotion, then into a bona fide UFC contender and, whether you were a fan or fighter, an alternative. While he may have had help from SVSE money and a broadcast partner like Showtime, what Coker did with Strikeforce is truly one of the most remarkable, impressive feats in the history of promoting human beings fighting. Coker took a kickboxing promotion founded in 1985, sparsely ever utilizing that brand, and over a decade later shocked the world by turning out an MMA card headlined by Frank Shamrock and Cesar Gracie. It wasn't the first sanctioned MMA card in California, but it was the first major one.
In trademark Coker fashion, he got away with a bit of sleight of hand, too: Shamrock was his guy and had a beef with Gracie, who, despite having perhaps the extended Gracie family's most prodigious mouth, had zero MMA qualifications. Somehow, at the 11th hour, the California State Athletic Commission drummed up a clandestine record that suggested Gracie was 14-0 in vale tudo rules bouts and allowed him to face a legitimate MMA legend. Shamrock laid him out in 20 seconds. Less than three years later, Coker was buying the EliteXC vestiges, contracts and tapes, turning his cute little San Jose, California, regional promotion into the UFC's top competitor for nearly four years. He signed away top talent from the UFC like Dan Henderson and acquired free agents like Fedor Emelianenko. Yes, these are precisely the heavy-spending moves that ultimately led SVSE to divest in Strikeforce and resulted in the sale to the UFC, but they're also the moves that made Strikeforce into more than some prospect-building feeder league. They're the moves that allowed Coker to become, in the post-Pride era, the only man to legitimately and meaningfully challenge the UFC in any way whatsoever; and unlike during the Pride era, Coker was coming from the underdog position.
However, Coker has had advantages in terms of the business logistics with both Strikeforce and Bellator. As I've detailed in past, Coker's only goal with Showtime was to increase paying subscriptions and turn decent ratings; with Spike, it's now simply trying to court 800,000 to one million viewers per show. Bellator 180 is something different. Coker has one experience with pay-per-view ever, the EliteXC-Strikeforce joint promotion for Shamrock-Phil Baroni, which did an estimated 30,000-40,000 buys. Bellator's first PPV, while corrupted by the dissolution of the Eddie Alvarez-Michael Chandler rubber match, was able to lean on the still-strong drawing power of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. Bellator 120 did an estimated 100,000 buys, but internally, Spike execs pegged the number higher and were largely enthusiastic and excited about the numbers the company did on PPV the first time, especially given the circumstances.
It is in this PPV promotion that the limitations of the Coker model come to the forefront. Promoting an event that by design asks consumers to part with their money? Maybe you want a more fired-up figurehead than Coker mumbling out “We'll have an announcement about that next week.” Chael Sonnen and Wanderlei Silva may draw a hot cable rating, but will folks pay for it? It's not just that both men are broken down shells of their former, steroid-infused selves, but they're clearly going through the motions on a non-physical level. Silva skipped a promotional event because he claims he was worried he would hit Sonnen, yet when they came face-to-face at the Thursday presser, Silva gave Sonnen the weakest, most perfunctory push to the chest you've ever seen, answered by the worst “Hold me back, bro!” routine you've ever seen from Sonnen. Remember when Jackson got in the ring in Pride and called out Silva? Remember when Silva shoved him, for real, while screaming “My belt! My belt!”? This was the complete opposite of that. Sonnen even went on Twitter after and unleashed a canned line about Silva being on his back like a Kardashian during the fight. Maybe it's actually 2007 still and I didn't notice.
The Coker repertoire is proven on premium and regular cable, but PPV is different fundamentally. Does someone want to shell out money to see Coker's boilerplate? Bellator 180 has nearly all relevant hands on deck -- three title fights and a ton of notable names -- but is that a PPV draw? I have no idea; we have no idea. Sonnen was only ever a PPV draw in a specific, Anderson Silva-related context, and that was seven years ago. The fight week promotion for this card has been terrible and smacks of how TV-centric Coker's model has been for years, relying on folks who either were going to watch already or would be incidentally seduced by fights while flicking channels. Coker, alongside his homies at the American Kickboxing Academy, have a track record of developing truly great fighters from the ground up, like Daniel Cormier and Luke Rockhold, but even if Aaron Pico goes on to become the most brilliant fighter we've ever seen, is that a consumer hook? Unlikely.
Pay-per-view is technically not a new frontier for Coker, but it really is when you get down to it. While he may be one of the greatest, shrewdest promoters we have ever seen, his style and tactics are entirely geared towards producing a certain kind of TV product that is magnetic to both diehard fight fans and casual TV clickers. While the standards for “success” are much different between the promotions, the UFC is struggling in this moment -- after Ronda Rousey and more or less after Conor McGregor -- to turn satisfactory PPV numbers. Bellator 180 needs to pass 100,000 buys to be considered a success on any level and that's achievable, but it's not some foregone conclusion, especially without a "Rampage" Jackson to cling to, and it's hard to deny that the Coker model, while perfect for weekly TV promotions, lacks in many of the capacities that we expect when it comes to promoting a PPV event. Phil Davis and Ryan Bader are going to potentially -- probably -- fight five boring rounds on Spike to lead into the PPV, to presumably entice people to buy it; this isn't exactly Leonard Garcia-Chan Sung Jung leading into WEC 48.
Even if Bellator 180 turns out to be a smashing success, it doesn't change things. Every MMA company wants to be on PPV because that's where the real money sits; Bellator and Viacom both want more of these events. Even if Coker's model proves to draw this time around, it doesn't alter the fact that a main event with washed-up former stars going through the rote motions of fight promotion and pretending to hate each other is a much harder sell in this venue than when it's just sitting there on cable, one or two remote control presses away. If Bellator 180 performs beyond expectations, Coker and Viacom should still thank their lucky stars and immediately start thinking about how promoting the next PPV could be better. The growing pains are obvious.
Still, there are worse problems to have. In the post-Pride era, every UFC competitor has died and no one other than Coker has ever been able to meaningfully challenge the throne. The fact that Bellator is in this position at all is a testament to the work of Rebney, Viacom and especially Coker, but the rules of engagement -- and more importantly success -- are different in this context. Can Coker's model work? I don't know. I guess I'll have an announcement about that in a week or two.
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