Issue 044

December 2008

“The promoters kind of hinted to me and they gave me the money to stand and trade with him. They didn’t want me to take him down. Let’s just put it that way. It was worth my while to try and stand up and punch with him.” Seth Petruzelli, Monday 6th October 

Within days, Seth Petruzelli’s radio interview admission, of something strongly rumoured by insiders, led to intense media scrutiny and the announcement of an official investigation by Florida’s Department of Business and Professional regulations into his October 4th fight with Kimbo Slice. Two weeks later it proved to have signalled the end of the entire promotion. On Monday 20th October, word spread that TV network CBS had pulled out of negotiations to buy the debt-ridden company. EliteXC were done. 

After almost two years of existing on credit, EliteXC were finally finished by the loose words of a jubilant fighter who quickly changed his story, offering the feeble excuse of being hungover and confused when he accidentally let the cat out of the bag. Petruzelli was hardly the only one to blame though. Others connected to EliteXC continually put their foot in it, ensuring the controversy grew and grew.  

The promotion’s head of fight operations Jeremy Lappen, gave conflicting accounts to different media outlets regarding exactly what bonuses Petruzelli was offered, and then feebly claimed he was ‘misquoted’. Even more damaging, former EliteXC boss Gary Shaw (later a ‘consultant’ to the company headed by his son Jared) told the Los Angeles Times he’d have no problem in telling an MMA fighter “‘We’re looking for a stand-up fight.’ You’re not asking him to throw a fight. You’re talking about a fan-friendly fight, not about protecting Kimbo. Do I think that’s unethical? No. Because in MMA, you get bonus money for a knockout. I don’t see it as unethical – asking him to be TV and fan friendly.” 

Shaw’s inability to see that secret arrangements of this nature are clearly unethical - but depending on exactly what was and wasn’t said to Petruzelli, they’re downright illegal cost his former company dearly. Of course, plenty more of Gary Shaw’s other decisions made the final announcement all but inevitable. It was under Shaw’s reign of error that EliteXC went on a bizarre acquisition spree, buying-up promotions from Hawaii to the UK to South Korea, and a few other places in-between.  

The promotion dropped a whopping $8 million in buying-out and settling the debts of Cage Rage alone. It was under Shaw that EliteXC began sinking so much money into a website, where they could stream live events for free that as of a few months ago, www.proelite.com had cost the company a mind-blowing $26 million while bringing in pitiful revenues.  The rot continued when Shaw departed, leaving the company to the (mis)guidance of Lappen and Shaw Jr. 

All those problems (and the near $60 million of accumulated debt) left EliteXC at the mercy of CBS. When the network pulled their offer, despite being happy with the ratings delivered by EliteXC’s top names (Kimbo and Gina Carano), it left the promotion with no money to even run their scheduled November 8th event, never mind look to 2009 and their long-talked about pay per view debut. CBS simply wanted no part of a scandal with even the faintest whiff of fight-fixing or promotional manipulation. Any established sport can survive match-fixing allegations and scandals – tennis, soccer and Sumo have all been subject to them in recent years – but it does none of them any good. MMA as a whole is still far from being just such an established sport, and the badly damaged EliteXC brand certainly wasn’t. 

Even its founders and owners clearly viewed MMA as the bastard stepchild of ‘proper’ sports like boxing and kickboxing. It was Gary Shaw’s vision of ‘fan-friendly’ stand-up fights that led the promotion to focus so heavily on the monumentally over hyped Kimbo Slice and, as they have recently admitted, to offer knockout bonuses much more regularly than submission bonuses. It also apparently led them to the shenanigans surrounding Kimbo’s fight with Petruzelli.  

Shaw’s obsession with ‘fan-friendly’ stand-up fights betrays his lack of understanding of what actually is ‘fan friendly’ in 2008. Look at the recent evidence. The October 4th EliteXC show drew 7,150 paying fans. A week later Gary Shaw promoted a major boxing show headlined by Antonio Tarver, defending his IBF / IBO light heavyweight titles, and pulling a mere 911 paying customers.  

If Shaw and company wanted to promote boxing or kickboxing so badly maybe they should have simply done so, leaving others to embrace and promote MMA as it is, rather than try to shabbily manipulate it to fit their own outdated ideas of what they thought it should be. Especially when, in the end, their vision was an undoubted failure that led to scandal, bankruptcy, left millions of fans disappointed, and dozens of contracted fighters, both male and female, worrying about where their next paycheque is coming from.