Issue 077
July 2011
His viral Bellator tournaments may be the new kid on the block, but tough-talking businessman Bjorn Rebney is no MMA lightweight.
If you thought Bellator Fighting Championships CEO Bjorn Rebney was relatively new to the fight game, you are sorely mistaken. The California native was literally raised on fighting. He was introduced to boxing by his grandfather, Milton Roth, a prominent boxing manager, and his uncle, Jerry Roth, a sports agent and attorney who worked with the California State Athletic Commission and World Boxing Hall of Fame.
After high school, Rebney’s love of athletics led him to acquire a masters degree in sports marketing, then bolstered his credentials by learning the legalities of contracts by studying law. Following the family line Bjorn passed the bar and began working as a sports agent and legal counsel at Steinburg, Moorad & Dunn. Founded by Leigh Steinburg – the man the term ‘Super Agent’ was coined for and whom the film Jerry Maguire was loosely based on – SM&D represented top athletes but no boxers; that is until a marquee fighter walked into the office in 1993.
“Lee called me to tell me that Oscar De La Hoya wanted us to represent him and he wanted me to look after the account because I knew a hell of a lot more about fighting sports than the rest of the people at the firm,” Rebney recalls. “That’s how I got into it and that’s how it started.”
Through representing De La Hoya he met all of the key players in boxing and eventually left SM&D to start a fight promotion company with boxing legend ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonard. In spite of his success, Rebney realized his true passion was for another combat sport.
“All along the line I was working in boxing I would hang out with my friends and we would watch all of the old UFC events, either on pay-per-view or VHS videos we ordered from Japan. We followed the sport like lunatics. We were that group of guys.”
His love of MMA prompted the businessman in Rebney to hypothesize about how the sport could successfully attract and keep a growing mainstream audience, but nobody he revealed his ideas to about what a potential goldmine the struggling sport could be wanted to listen. Then, in 2005, The Ultimate Fighter cracked the code of how to bring mixed martial arts to the masses. Rebney’s MMA vision was proved plausible.
“I looked at the dynamic, I tracked the numbers, I looked at the overnights and I looked at the ratings [of TUF] because I knew better than anybody that if someone put the time, energy and money behind this, it would be prolifically and explosively huge. When the first numbers started coming back from Spike and everyone freaked out and looked at the ratings and were like, ‘I can’t believe it. Look at how well this is doing.’ I was turning to people and saying, ‘I told you so.’ I knew this would work,” Rebney explains. “Literally at that moment, I started laying the groundwork in my head how I would put it together and what I would try to do if I ever had my own organization.”
Now he does, and just two years into Bellator’s existence, he says the promotion is very similar to how he envisioned it when it was just a pipedream. However, he points out that no matter how well things are going, he sees aspects of growth in every area.
“There is always room for improvement,” he acknowledges. “When you look at any type of live event or television show and say, ‘I think that’s perfect,’ that’s when you’re dead.”
Still a self-professed ‘MMA addict’ after all these years, the 45-year-old promoter who says he watches as many events as possible, doesn’t understand how or why promoters get into the sport but aren’t fans.
“It shocks me when I hear promoters say, ‘I don’t watch their shows.’ Well then what are you doing?” he asks incredulously.
Although the UFC is considered by most as being a Bellator competitor, Rebney doesn’t necessarily see it that way. He says that because his promotion’s events are a blend of seasonal mainstream sports’ and a tournament format that borrows from reality television’s weekly formula, both promotions can successfully coexist because they offer fans variety akin to what NASCAR and Formula One provides racing fans.
“Joe Silva, the UFC’s matchmaker, does a great job setting up fights, but we have a tournament format that decides who fights whom and when. Matchmaking literally controls every other major fight organization in the world, be it mixed martial arts or boxing,” Rebney says. “It just so happened there was synchronicity in making it objective, taking out subjectivity and making it fit into a 12-week sequence of television programming which has proven successful with competition-based reality shows.”
That’s not to say Rebney hasn’t tried to play matchmaker. Last year, after Strikeforce lightweight champ Gilbert Melendez called out his Bellator belt-holding counterpart Eddie Alvarez, Rebney tried to make it happen.
“We pursued it; some people say – and I don’t necessarily disagree with them – that we perhaps pursued it somewhat too aggressively. Gilbert called for the fight and Eddie responded immediately that he wanted to do it. He called me at home 10 minutes after Gilbert called him out and we went on the offensive... But Scott [Coker, Strikeforce CEO] was never willing to discuss it,” Rebney explains. “There was literally never a conversation between us. Now Zuffa owns Strikeforce it likely won’t happen, which is too bad because I’ve always thought that Gilbert versus Eddie would have been a great fight between two of the greatest lightweights in the world who weren’t attached to the UFC. As a fan, that’s a fight I want to see.”
That’s a fight we all want to see.
