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In his next high-profile battle, two-time UFC welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre won’t need shorts, gloves, a cup, or a mouth piece.
The 35-year-old, who usually plays his cards close to his vest, surprised the mixed martial arts community on Tuesday’s MMA Hour by claiming that he is a free agent, no longer shackled by his UFC contract.
Unsurprisingly, the UFC immediately hit back, denying the Canadian fighter’s claims.
“Georges St. Pierre remains under an existing agreement with Zuffa, LLC as his MMA promoter,” a UFC statement sent to the press read. “Zuffa intends to honor (sic) its agreement with St-Pierre and reserves its rights under the law to have St. Pierre do the same.”
Long-time followers of the sport will recall a similar situation in 2007 with then-UFC heavyweight champion Randy Couture announced a bogus retirement in hopes of wriggling out of his UFC deal to pursue a champion-versus-champion fight against Fedor Emelianenko, the Russian widely regarded as the greatest MMA heavyweight ever.
Couture got tied up in a Zuffa lawsuit and eventually caved, being lured back to the Nevada-based promotion for a pay-per-view clash with Brock Lesnar.
What separates the two cases, however, is that St. Pierre is financially set. As he said on Tuesday, “when you keep a lot of your staff starving, they are easier to control,” and St. Pierre is not starving.
In the history of combat sports, legal battles pitting fighters-versus-promoters are typically won by the promoters, often by default, with cases disappearing as soon as the publicity dies down without money to sustain them.
Former heavyweight boxing champion Tim Witherspoon once filed a $25 million lawsuit against Don and Carl King, claiming he never got his fair share of the money generated from his bouts.
During the Philadelphia-based knockout artist’s time under King, the eccentric promoter insisted that his step-son Carl serves as Witherspoon’s manager, a major conflict of interest.
Even worse, Carl took a 50 percent slice of the fighters purse (which is illegal) and Don even confessed to having the former heavyweight king sign multiple contracts, one of which was blank.
Witherspoon had a strong case against the powerful ex-con, who once ruled the sport of boxing with an iron fist, but King had the financial pull to stretch the case out over six years before finally relenting and paying $1 million. And believe it or not, that’s considered a success story in boxing.
St. Pierre, unlike Witherspoon, has made zero public claims of being short-changed by his promoters. Instead, the fighters attorney Jim Quinn insists the UFC has breached his contract by not putting forward a fight offer.
According to Quinn, St. Pierre’s legal team set a 10-day deadline for the UFC to offer the French-Canadian athlete a bout after not being offered a single fight in 2016. They claim the promotion responded at the 11th hour, proposing St. Pierre versus recently dethroned 170-pound champ Robbie Lawler but specific details, such as date, venue, and number of rounds were not included.
“Our position is the contract is terminated. I suppose they could take legal steps against that or they could offer a new contract. They have a variety of options on their side,” Quinn told ESPN.
If you can read between the lines, this appears to be a public move by St. Pierre and his team of legal heavy hitters to get the welterweight GOAT a new contract.
When the Quebec-born wrestle-boxer stepped away from the sport as champion in 2013, he was the UFC’s most bankable pay-per-view star, bolstering his bottom line with lucrative sponsorship deals for himself as the most marketable fighter of all time.
In his absence, a lot has changed, most notably the UFC has signed a six-year, $70 million exclusive uniform deal with Reebok. With that shift set in stone, if he were to return tomorrow, St. Pierre would be entitled to a measly $20,000 under the tiered payment system.
The long-standing rumour is that St. Pierre is looking to be compensated for the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost in sponsorship pay in a new contract, and the UFC is not willing to cough up the dough to get the pay-per-view juggernaut back on the roster.
While St. Pierre’s and his team could (and almost certainly will) tease the possibility of fighting in rival promotions, it’s safe to assume it’s a bluff.
The reality is, other companies can’t serve up hefty contracts like the UFC. As television vehicles, promotions such as Viacom-owned Bellator MMA can’t offer a slice of pay-per-view revenue, which for St. Pierre usually accounts for multiple millions each bout.
If St. Pierre ever does compete again it will almost certainly be in an octagonal UFC cage, but his next fight in a courtroom or at the negotiation table against the multi-billion dollar promotion could prove to be his toughest challenge yet.