Las Vegas Weekly

May 29, 2008 · 11:31 PM

UFC-EliteXC network dustup stirrs mixed martial angst

By Robin Leach

A two-hour live Mixed Martial Arts CBS-network telecast Saturday night has got the UFC head honchos here steamed! That’s because the debut free over-the-air show 2,400 miles away in Newark, N.J., could drastically change forever the tough-guys mega-bucks playing field! Ironically, it’s a case of two Las Vegas fight producer promoters going head to head in the full-blown, drag-out knockdown ratings battle -- and its started an incredible war of words between EliteXC officials and Dana White who heads up the hometown HQ’d UFC.

In a further ironic note, Dana negotiated with CBS first -- but the network officials decided they just couldn’t or wouldn’t work with him. They announced back in February they would go with EliteXC instead! To blunt the CBS impact, Dana has ordered his Spike cable TV partners to run a 12-hour Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell-hosted marathon of super fights and bio-films. It’s an unprecedented move in TV history. But at stake are at least three future big-money Saturday night CBS telecasts right from here in Vegas! If the CBS ratings are good the deal is on -- and Dana wants to do everything possible to prevent that happening!

The CBS card promises extraordinary action for MMA fans. Kimbo Slice of Perrine, Fla., will face England’s James “Colossus’’ Thompson in the main event. Also on the card: EliteXC middleweight champion Robbie Lawler of St. Louis defends against Scott Smith of Sacramento, Phil Baroni of Long Island, N.Y., meets Joey Villasenor of Albuquerque, N.M., in a 185-pound scrap; Brett Rogers of Minneapolis takes on Jon Murphy of Philadelphia in a heavyweight match; and in the only women’s bout, Gina Carano of Las Vegas will face hard-hitting, confident Hook 'n Shoot champion Kaitlin Young of Circle Pines, Minn., at 140 pounds.

Elite Xtreme Combat, also known as EliteXC, is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The first network prime-time exposure for MMA is being produced by David Dinkins Jr of Las Vegas who during the CBS telecast of the recent Academy of Country Music Awards sat in the satellite trucks parked behind MGM to fully understand the network’s live requirements and rules.

Already the “war of words” has escalated into an explosive, fiery feud between EliteXC’s Gary Shaw and UFC’s Dana White. It started with Dana: “The amount of talent and fights we put on are second to none. Think about it, the CBS fight that they are coming up with, who gives a crap about Kimbo Slice? This guy can't fight MMA. You know what would happen if he fought in the UFC? Slice would get annihilated. Kimbo has no credibility at all in MMA.”

Shaw was furious about White trashing his card and his organization and minced no words at all. "Dana White is a jack-off. Dana White is a (expletive) idiot and you can quote me on that. If he cared about MMA, he would understand that. Comments like that make you look like a jerk. If Dana wasn't such an idiot, the CBS show would be the UFC instead of us. It’s my honor to promote this show in prime time. This event is probably the single biggest thing to ever happen in the sport of mixed martial arts. The fact you will get this for free is huge for MMA. It is something we are very proud to bring you. More eyeballs will watch this show than has seen any other fight in the world. Nothing can be bigger for our company. To these fighters, this is it. Come Sunday they will be cult heroes. It will change their lives dramatically. To the athletes that signed with EliteXC, we have delivered something that has never been delivered in MMA.

“I believe the future of the sport is resting on our shoulders. If we don’t have the largest MMA audience, I will hang myself. That will make for great live television. It will be a fast five-fight format that will really move with fast-paced action. The stoppages are fast, the action is fast. You don’t get 12 rounds of a boring fight; you get nonstop action and high energy throughout the night. On EliteXC, you are not going to watch two guys having a love fest on the ground. You are going to see an exciting fight. Fighters are the most important thing in our company. We work for the fighters.

“No organization owns all the best fighters and no organization owns all the best fights. UFC got this started, but we are coming now. When UFC looks through the rearview mirror, we are on their bumper. There are a lot of important things that we can do to help MMA. Imagine if we could do a show of UFC vs. EliteXC. We are willing to do that. If we can send women to war, then they should fight on TV. We are ultra-confident that we will bring the arena experience right into your room. We are all about the sport. If we don’t succeed in growing the sport, it will die on the vine. Every time we do these fights it gets bigger and bigger. Some like the violence, I like the fast pace. That is what boxing is missing.”

A CBS executive commented: “We are thrilled to be bringing mixed martial arts to a wide audience. We’re going to start with the four fight broadcasts and in success hopefully expand that further but the bar for success isn’t all that high. We really don’t know what to expect, but we’re anticipating good things. To get new fans in to the fold, we really want to build the sport and one way to do that is to maximize the sport as best we can. These are world class athletes who walk out of a gym and into to a cage.”

Our hometown heroine Carano added: “I think it’s important to remember we’re not just female fighters. We’re fighters. This is going to be one of the toughest hardest fights of my life and I hope the guys enjoy it. It is exciting. There are a lot of female fighters in the world, the public just needs to warm up to them.”

Dinkins commented: “We wanted to fill all the requirements with great experts, the best historian, reporter and announcer. We are sensitive to the violence level. I think we are going to see how fast we can go. We don’t want it to be too graphic and we don’t want to turn people off, but we want to be true to the sport. The refs are on top of things. There isn’t a chance of sustained concussions. This sport is very safe. It is sport and entertainment. What makes the stars stars is that there is the special X factor of the entertainment portion. If we are not properly broadcasting this, we are not doing our jobs. What makes this special is the arena experience. It will be a smooth-running story of the night that we plan to broadcast.

"There will be some challenges with the commercials, but we will show you the whole night.”

Commentator Gus Johnson said: “ Hopefully our approach is to not only highlight what these athletes do in the ring, but also outside. I want to know about Kimbo Slice and how he was one of the Top 10 linebackers in the U.S. I want to know more about Gina Carano. Our team will approach this the same way we approach the NFL on CBS, the NCAA on CBS. Mixed martial arts is the sport of the future. It’s about kids, not 30-year-olds like us. What America is going to see is guys going out there and fighting. I have called all the big sports, but what I like about this sport is you get to see athletes who will leave it all out in the ring. You will see nonstop action, and that is exciting. We will tell America what we see. We won’t be edited by anyone. We want to tell a positive story.”

White’s “war of words” isn’t only against Elite XC. He’s also continued his verbal assault on Tito Ortiz, who fought his last UFC contract battle 6-days ago at MGM: “Tito is a (expletive) idiot. He's one of the dumbest human beings I've ever met. Everything that comes out of his mouth makes no sense. I put up with his (expletive) when he was a good fighter. He's not anymore. He's not in anybody's top 10. I have no interest whatsoever in being in the Tito Ortiz business. I've never wanted to see anyone get their ass kicked worse than I want to see Tito get his kicked."

Tito fired back: "Dana White is a complete monster, a controlling guy who wants his hands in everything. He’s a bully. He has always been about the power. He wants everything focused on him. UFC is a great company. They just have a monster running it. It’s time for me to forget about Dana White, to move on after 11 years of building my legacy and helping UFC become a household name. It's time to show everyone what I am worth. Dana can just go fly around in his jet and act like a superstar. He has always considered anyone who speaks out as a threat. That's fine. I guess being a bully makes him feel better about himself."

GOVERNOR GOSSIP ABOUT “OTHER WOMAN” IN DIVORCE BATTLE IS NO SURPRISE TO LUXE LIFE READERS:

Nevada first lady Dawn Gibbons’ divorce lawyer, Cal Dunlap has gone public in court documents blaming her broken marriage to Gov. Jim Gibbons on another woman. Cal is trying to get the divorce case unsealed and open in a public forum. He doesn’t beat around the bush claiming Nevada’s

No. 1 executive wants the divorce because of an affair with another woman: “Despite his disingenuous, shallow and transparent protestations that his relationship with another man’s wife is a mere friendship, his infatuation and involvement with the other woman is the real, concealed and undisclosed reason for his voluntary departure from the marriage and the mansion where he occasionally resided.”

Ouch!!

None of this should come as a surprise to Luxe Life readers, because we were the first to reveal the ever-increasing torrent of back-and-forth IM’s and text messages between the governor and the long-time friendly woman that infuriated the first lady. We served up the saucy soap-opera scandal six weeks ago in our “Wicked Whispers & Racy Rumors” -- way ahead of all the various Nevada newspapers, which have now only this week jumped all over the scandal.

— From Vegas Deluxe

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