TangleBones

Fol­low­ing up on my post  about how not making weight may have been a good move for Gina Carano, I have some ques­tions about the kind of rea­son­ing Kaitlin Young had to do. 

There’s been a lot of talk about how “the fix was in” for some of the fights at Eli­teXC Prime­time. But what if it made more sense for a fighter to lose than to win? I don’t have any evi­dence, there’s no reason to sus­pect that anyone threw a fight, and until the pay­outs are released this is just idle spec­u­la­tion, but it’s an inter­est­ing thought exercise.

Stated simply: what if the 12.5% that Young got from losing to Carano was more than her win bonus?

The infor­ma­tion about the deal that was worked out has been very vague, but it sounds like Young was to receive her base pay, her win bonus if applic­a­ble, and 12.5% of what­ever Carano made. What we don’t know is if that per­cent­age was of her fight pay, her win pay, or her com­bined pay, and this makes a huge dif­fer­ence. The way it was reported cer­tainly sounded like the pri­mary factor was Carano’s com­bined pay. We can safely assume that Carano is making more than Young, but how much is up in the air. But there’s a good chance that it was sig­nif­i­cant. Let’s try some math: 

If Young was paid $10K to fight and $10K to lose, and Carano was paid $100K to fight and $100K to win, win­ning the fight would get Young $32.5K: $10K + $10K + $12.5. Losing would get her $35K: $10K + $25K. Now I obvi­ously made those num­bers up, but for a first time fighter and a head­liner, that doesn’t sound too unrea­son­able. In fact, it might be a bit conservative.

But let’s play with the num­bers: If Young were paid $4K/$4K – a rea­son­able amount – and Gina still made $100K/$100K, win­ning would get Kaitlin $20.5K, while losing would get her $33K. If Gina made $50K/$50K, the dif­fer­ence between win­ning and losing is $14.25K/$18.5K. 

Obvi­ously, it’s all more com­pli­cated than this. Win­ning has other con­se­quences than just a bonus: more and better spon­sors, higher pay for the next fight, and even a long-​term con­tract are all worth some­thing. But that all depends on how risk averse Young is. Would it be better to make an addi­tional few thou­sand and risk tank­ing her career? Who can say?

This is of course not an attempt to say that Young threw the fight: she was clearly fight­ing very hard, and she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would be moti­vated to risk her career for a few extra dol­lars. But there are fight­ers who have more bills and less scru­ples than her, and this kind of arrange­ment (large dif­fer­ence in fighter pay, penalties assessed as a per­cent­age) is clearly a moral quag­mire wait­ing to happen.

Orga­ni­za­tions need to come up with a dif­fer­ent way of arrang­ing for these penal­ties, before this kind of prob­lem becomes an issue. But again: this is all spec­u­la­tion. What do you think?

Orig­i­nally posted on Bloody Elbow. Comments closed here.