Issue 029

September 2007

In the world of mixed martial arts (MMA), there are plenty of people who have a hand in how the sport moves along, but few have quite the involvement that Monte Cox does. 

Cox is a manager and promoter based out of Iowa, the sleepy state that is a hotbed of MMA. With nothing much else to do in Iowa other than farm or fish, MMA is exploding in popularity, and much of that is thanks to Cox’s various projects. 

A manager of over 80 fighters and promoter of over 60 shows a year, Cox has the biggest names on his books. He has had a total of seven Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champions and once had four titleholders all at the same time. “People misunderstand what a manager actually does. I’m a lot more than a guy who just goes out and gets people fights. I decide where they fight, when they fight, who they fight and how much for. Their whole career is handed to me.”

His beginnings in combat sports aren’t what you might think though, as Cox was actually a professional athlete himself at one point. “I boxed amateur when I was young, I went to college and played basketball. I went back to boxing and boxed professionally for a few years, then I became the sports editor of a newspaper, as I had a degree in journalism. I moved from Indiana to Iowa to run a newspaper, and I began promoting small boxing shows.” 

Moving to Iowa put Monte in contact with a man who would go on to do great things in MMA and, indeed, lend his name to one of the most well-known fight teams in the world; Pat Miletich. “I heard about Miletich, who was the area’s toughest guy. He was getting ready to do this ultimate fighting. He said ‘come down to the gym, see what we’re working on and you can write your article’. He showed me how they trained and instantly I was mesmerised, I thought ‘wow, this was amazing’.” 

“I went up to Chicago for his professional first fight. I was amazed at the spectacle, the crowd was huge, they were excited and I just loved it. He said we need to promote a show back home, and I go ‘nah I’m doing boxing’. He said ‘trust me, we’ll sell a tonne of tickets’. I finally decided what the heck, let’s try one of these.” 

Held in 1996, his first MMA show sold over 8000 tickets and he made ‘a bunch of money’. “All of a sudden this whole newspaper idea wasn’t as important to me anymore. I waited until I had seven full years in the company, and got my full pension and retirement, quit my job and became a full-time promoter.” 

Even though Cox was a successful promoter, the idea of managing fighters was actually thrust upon him, as he decided that it was in both his and the fighters’ best interests if he was to manage them. “I kept noticing that people would come to my shows, snatch up my guys, grab them and manage them, send them to Brazil to get butchered, and they would come back and wouldn’t want to fight for me anymore. I didn’t want to manage anybody, but I got tired of it. I started managing fighters and I started off with Pat Miletich. I told him, ‘I don’t want to make a penny until you make it into the UFC’.” His close relationship with Pat and the team meant Monte looked after all their interests. “I had good fighters to take around. My first group was Pat Miletich, Jeremy Horn, Matt Hughes and Jens Pulver. Pretty soon we had a powerhouse.” 

Rich Franklin, Sean Sherk, Roger Huerta and many, many more fighters are represented by Monte and, when you look at the level of success they enjoy, you realise that he’s certainly onto something. “I manage over 50 fighters, and I have 34 guys in the UFC. I’ve got a big chunk of the UFC roster. The recent UFC in Miami [Ultimate Fight Night]: of nine fights I had guys in seven of them. I got a lot of guys in the World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) and other organisations. I have a great relationship with Joe Silva [UFC matchmaker] as they are still one of the best paying events. I look to put my guys there but there are other organisations we work a lot with, such as Art of War in Texas, Richard Steel’s promotion and more. There’s so many, I work with everybody.” 

The reason for his success? Partly it is because Cox doesn’t poach established fighters – instead, he develops them from day one into the stars they are now, but it is also because of the relationship he enjoys with his fighters. “I get them early and I build their career. Matt Hughes had two fights when I took him, Franklin was still an amateur, and Tim Sylvia had one fight. We have almost a farm system where we run smaller shows and look for talent. If I see someone I think has talent I will pull them out of the small shows and give them to Chad [Bergmeier, one of Cox’s employees who runs shows for him in the Mid West], he will get them experience and then they come back to me and I put them in the big shows.” 

“I don’t do fighter contracts. Everybody I manage is a handshake. I have the best sales pitch ever. I tell them straight, if I’m not doing my job, you can say goodbye and walk away. How can you beat a deal like that? I’ve only ever lost one guy, and that was Sean Sherk right after the Hughes fight. Two years later after his new contract was up he was right back with me.” [Interestingly, I asked Cox what happened when his fighters met in the Octagon. “I don’t like putting my

guys together,” he said. “They can fight each other if they don’t train together, and they can fight if it’s for a championship and it’s good for their career, but I don’t like it.”] 

His rep as one of the best managers in the game and his considerable business acumen means he has not only built a client list that reads like a who’s who of MMA, but he has taken these fighters on to places many only dream of. “For two hours I had four out of five UFC champs. I had Matt [Hughes] at welterweight and Tim Sylvia, Sean Sherk beat Kenny Florian to capture the lightweight title, but then Anderson Silva beat Rich Franklin later that night to take the middleweight championship.” 

With so many high calibre fighters under his belt and Cox bringing up-and-comers into the UFC like no tomorrow, rival managers must surely think twice about matching up one of their guys against a Cox-managed fighter? Cox half-jokingly asks the same thing himself. “I often wonder, if I was in the other people’s shoes and I’m looking at us and they see me confidently putting my guy in against them, I would wonder, what does he know that I don’t know?”