I get where Rampage is coming from, I do. But on the same token, it’s hard to relate to a dude who’s made millions of dollars from his former employer. The same employer that stood by him when he, literally, went on a rampage that ended up injuring a woman who lost her baby and caused many others to “flee in terror” when he drove his monster truck on the sidewalks of sunny Costa Mesa. And still, I get it.
The UFC has effectively killed off any lucrative sponsor deals inside the Octagon for its fighters. The sponsor fee, which is up to $50k, the general lack of quality sponsors, and the ousting of any sponsors not up to snuff to the UFC’s criteria (Condom Depot), has rendered fighters to making a fraction of the cash they used to. And now fighters a speaking up. Loudly. One of them is howling, and it’s Rampage Jackson, the new golden child of Spike/Viacom and Bellator collectively. This is what Rampage said on Sherdog Radio:
“When you’re trying to prepare for a fight, you’ve got to spend your own money on your training camp and stuff like that. A good training camp will cost you [$100,000]. If it costs you [$100,000] for that training camp and then you fight and you make whatever you make and then taxes come out and stuff like that, a lot of times you come out losing a lot of money. You kind of lose the love for it. You’re like, ‘Why am I doing this? I’m not appreciated.’ You take a fight injured. You don’t back out of the fight because if you back out of the fight, it messes the card up and then the promotion knows you’re injured and they still talk s–t on you. You just lose love for it. But when I talked to Bellator, they were like, ‘We’ll get you endorsements. You can have any endorsement you want. We’ll help you get some.’ … They were like, ‘We don’t care how much money you make off endorsements. We want to help you.’ That’s what got the love back for me.”
“As fighters, we have to fight for money because our bodies are going to be really messed up after we retire from fighting. We’ve got to make as much capital as we can make now so we can save up when we retire for the rest of our lives.”
“Now I’m kind of happy that that actually happened because even though the fans don’t understand it, they don’t see it, but I think Bellator is actually going to come up. You’ve got to think about it. Spike TV is what made the UFC. The UFC wouldn’t be where it is without Spike TV.”
