MMAstyles
10-30-2006, 12:26 PM
Interesting article I saw about IFL after hearing about the Mike Whitehead fight. It looks like the IFL is doing the right things to break into the biz...
....
A league of their own
Sunday, October 29, 2006
By DUNSTAN PRIAL
STAFF WRITER
In the closing seconds of the first round of a professional mixed martial arts event held in June in Atlantic City, Chris Horodecki landed a punch flush to the side of his opponent's face.
A split-second later, Horodecki, 18 years old and with the baby fat to prove it, landed a thudding kick to his rival's ribs.
Then, as his stunned foe's legs gave out from under him, Horodecki finished what he started with a whip-like kick to the temple. Fight over.
If Bergen County entrepreneurs Kurt Otto and Gareb Shamus have their way, Horodecki might one day be a household name like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady.
Otto, 36, and Shamus, 37, are co-founders of the newly formed International Fight League, the first professional mixed martial arts league.
History hasn't been kind to start-up professional sports leagues. Consider the failed efforts of the USFL and, more recently, the XFL to take on the National Football League. Then there was the WUSA, a women's soccer league that hoped to capitalize on the popularity of the 1999 Women's World Cup competition but folded in 2003 after three seasons.
Getting out of the gate seems to be the easy part. It's staying in the race that's difficult.
To be sure, Otto and Shamus have exploded out of the gate.
In less than two years, they have turned an idea brainstormed over drinks at a Charlie Brown's Steakhouse in Tenafly into 10 teams of eight fighters, a national television deal and a growing number of A-list sponsors and partners, including Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
And by the end of the year, they plan to make the IFL a publicly traded company.
"We've been very impressed with how they've been able to get a league off the ground," said Adam Holzer, senior vice president of Fox Sports Net, which has broadcast four IFL events this year and is negotiating with the league for the rights to the 2007 regular season.
Unlike other professional mixed martial arts competitions, which have traditionally been broadcast as pay-per-view events, the IFL, seeking maximum exposure, sought deals only with free television networks.
For the uninitiated, mixed martial arts is exactly that – a hybrid of boxing, wrestling, karate, judo, tae kwon do and other self-defense styles.
As the popularity of boxing has dimmed due to a lack of star power and widespread frustration with the sport's rampant corruption, professional mixed martial arts has exploded.
The IFL has differentiated itself in the diverse and widely scattered sport with a team concept that emulates the four major professional team sports in the U.S.
This innovative approach for a so-called professional combat sport puts it in stark contrast to the organizational structure established in boxing and embraced by the handful of mixed martial arts sanctioning bodies that have sprung up in the last decade or so as MMA has gained in popularity.
Under those structures, which have been adopted by the IFL's chief rivals, Ultimate Fighting Championship and Pride, solo fighters vie for individual championships and personal glory.
Under the concept envisioned by Otto and Shamus, teams will compete over a six-month season, culminating in playoffs and a championship.
"These guys have a long-term plan, but they seem to understand that there will be red ink in the beginning," said Eddie Goldman, a journalist and mixed martial arts Web site host who has followed the sport for years.
"I think they have a good chance of succeeding, but they need to develop stars. People like to watch people. What I like about the IFL is that they've kept the dignity of the sport," Goldman said.
The team concept, he said, promotes sportsmanship and honor, characteristics long associated with the martial arts.
Sponsors believe the IFL's team structure opens up broader marketing possibilities than Otto and Shamus would've had if they focused solely on individual fighters. Fans from a particular region can develop long-term allegiances to a team, some of whose members might become stars, the thinking goes. And sponsors are attracted to the notion of long-term allegiances.
"I think those are aspects that make it very interesting for us as a sponsor, and I think they have a lot of potential," said Bill Nielsen, senior director for global partnerships for Microsoft's Xbox gaming unit, an early sponsor. "If it keeps developing at the pace it has been, we're going to be really excited that we got in early."
Xbox's logo is prominently displayed on the IFL's fighting mat.
In addition to ramping up marketing potential, the team structure will provide the IFL's fighters with regular salaries (in the mid-$20,000 range) and health benefits, and allow them to compete on a fixed schedule.
Indeed, it was the elements that benefited the fighters that were most important to Otto, an architectural designer and real estate investor from Haworth, for whom the IFL is essentially a labor of love.
A varsity wrestler at Bergenfield High School, Otto has been a fan and participant in mixed martial arts since childhood. He holds a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do.
The IFL grew out of Otto's disdain for the direction his beloved sport was taking as it grew in popularity over the past decade.
"The system was unbalanced. It was steered toward the benefit of the organization and not toward the athlete. It was always pretty much a one-sided deal," he said.
Otto, after joining forces with Shamus, decided to create a league in which the fighters would become full-time professional athletes, allowing them to give up the day jobs that paid the bills between fights.
Otto first introduced Shamus to the world of mixed martial arts in the spring of 2005. His potential partner was inspired.
Shamus, now of Tenafly, grew up collecting comic books and superhero action figures with his brothers in Rockland County.
After college, he founded a publishing company that has grown to five magazines, each geared toward adult fans of comic books, video games and superhero action figures. It's a demographic with lots of disposable income and free time, and one Shamus later discovered to be the same as that for professional mixed martial arts.
Shamus, whose flagship publication, Wizard, is a glossy monthly that bills itself as the magazine of comics, entertainment and pop culture, said he immediately saw the possibilities for leveraging his expertise in branding, marketing and advertising after hearing Otto's vision for the IFL.
"I'm in the male, 18-to-34 business," he said, pointing out that his magazines reach 3 million people each month. After seeing his first professional mixed martial arts event, Shamus said he viewed the fighters as "real life superheroes."
After raising $1.5 million by dipping into their own savings and by hitting up family and friends, the two began to pitch their idea to potential supporters from the mixed martial arts world.
In short order, they had lined up a who's who of mixed martial arts royalty. Primary among them was Kanji Inoki, an icon in Japan who fought Muhammad Ali to a draw in an exhibition match in 1976.
Inoki, Otto said, was impressed with the idea of providing the IFL's fighters salaries and benefits. "He said he thought it was an honorable idea," said Otto.
In addition to the salary, fighters can earn performance bonuses at each IFL event by participating in the evening's best fight, or throwing the best knockout punch, or forcing the best submission.
To attract coaches, Otto and Shamus offered them equity stakes in the company. The coaches were handpicked by the founders from an international network of longtime mixed martial arts competitors. Most of the coaches train in -- or perhaps even own -- one of the 30,000 MMA gyms in the U.S., and each was given free reign to tap into the local talent for their team rosters.
Brazilian Renzo Gracie, a 39-year-old former world champion who has traveled the globe to compete for $1,500 purses, was recruited to coach New York's Pitbulls. (IFL fight venues for 2007 have yet to be announced, but are expected to be held at sites of 3,000 to 9,000 seats.)
"I couldn't help but join him [Otto]. My whole life I've dreamed of this opportunity. With Kurt, I saw my youthful dream and I got onboard," Gracie said in an interview at the Manhattan training gym he owns in a teeming and sweaty basement on West 30th Street.
Gracie said the IFL's team concept appealed to him because, as a longtime coach and trainer, he has always pushed the virtues of teamwork. And on a practical level, the IFL is providing something he never had as a young fighter -- security.
"This is the most important part. These guys are actually generating jobs for coaches, trainers and fighters. Salaries and benefits -- these are things I didn't have. I had to put everything together myself to do what I loved," said Gracie.
Given the financial struggles of recent start-up leagues, the IFL has its skeptics.
"The odds are against them. They've got their work cut out for them. Time will take care of that, but they may not have much time," said John Antil, a professor of marketing at the University of Delaware who has studied sports marketing.
Otto and Shamus aren't concerned.
To increase access to investors, and to raise the IFL's visibility, Otto and Shamus are taking the league public this year through a reverse merger with a failed biotech company.
As a publicly traded company, the IFL will not only open itself to coverage in the financial press but also to scrutiny heretofore unheard of in the fight world, Shamus said.
"Now for the first time, there will be a transparency to our sport. Everything we've done hasn't been done before in this industry, which is why we believe we're going to be Number One," he said.
E-mail: prial@northjersey.com
* * *
Going public
In August, the IFL agreed to merge with failed biotech company Paligent Inc., whose shares trade in the over-the-counter market rather than on a major exchange. Once the merger is completed this year, the IFL will emerge as the surviving company and its stock will be publicly traded.
Other publicly held sports/entertainment leagues include the United States Basketball League, a training ground for the NBA, and World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., the Stanford, Conn.-based professional wrestling empire.
Professional teams that have sold shares of their stock include the Green Bay Packers, the Boston Celtics, the Cleveland Indians and the Florida Panthers.
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qst ... k3MDExNjM3 (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyJmZnYmVs N2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3MDExNjM3)
....
A league of their own
Sunday, October 29, 2006
By DUNSTAN PRIAL
STAFF WRITER
In the closing seconds of the first round of a professional mixed martial arts event held in June in Atlantic City, Chris Horodecki landed a punch flush to the side of his opponent's face.
A split-second later, Horodecki, 18 years old and with the baby fat to prove it, landed a thudding kick to his rival's ribs.
Then, as his stunned foe's legs gave out from under him, Horodecki finished what he started with a whip-like kick to the temple. Fight over.
If Bergen County entrepreneurs Kurt Otto and Gareb Shamus have their way, Horodecki might one day be a household name like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady.
Otto, 36, and Shamus, 37, are co-founders of the newly formed International Fight League, the first professional mixed martial arts league.
History hasn't been kind to start-up professional sports leagues. Consider the failed efforts of the USFL and, more recently, the XFL to take on the National Football League. Then there was the WUSA, a women's soccer league that hoped to capitalize on the popularity of the 1999 Women's World Cup competition but folded in 2003 after three seasons.
Getting out of the gate seems to be the easy part. It's staying in the race that's difficult.
To be sure, Otto and Shamus have exploded out of the gate.
In less than two years, they have turned an idea brainstormed over drinks at a Charlie Brown's Steakhouse in Tenafly into 10 teams of eight fighters, a national television deal and a growing number of A-list sponsors and partners, including Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
And by the end of the year, they plan to make the IFL a publicly traded company.
"We've been very impressed with how they've been able to get a league off the ground," said Adam Holzer, senior vice president of Fox Sports Net, which has broadcast four IFL events this year and is negotiating with the league for the rights to the 2007 regular season.
Unlike other professional mixed martial arts competitions, which have traditionally been broadcast as pay-per-view events, the IFL, seeking maximum exposure, sought deals only with free television networks.
For the uninitiated, mixed martial arts is exactly that – a hybrid of boxing, wrestling, karate, judo, tae kwon do and other self-defense styles.
As the popularity of boxing has dimmed due to a lack of star power and widespread frustration with the sport's rampant corruption, professional mixed martial arts has exploded.
The IFL has differentiated itself in the diverse and widely scattered sport with a team concept that emulates the four major professional team sports in the U.S.
This innovative approach for a so-called professional combat sport puts it in stark contrast to the organizational structure established in boxing and embraced by the handful of mixed martial arts sanctioning bodies that have sprung up in the last decade or so as MMA has gained in popularity.
Under those structures, which have been adopted by the IFL's chief rivals, Ultimate Fighting Championship and Pride, solo fighters vie for individual championships and personal glory.
Under the concept envisioned by Otto and Shamus, teams will compete over a six-month season, culminating in playoffs and a championship.
"These guys have a long-term plan, but they seem to understand that there will be red ink in the beginning," said Eddie Goldman, a journalist and mixed martial arts Web site host who has followed the sport for years.
"I think they have a good chance of succeeding, but they need to develop stars. People like to watch people. What I like about the IFL is that they've kept the dignity of the sport," Goldman said.
The team concept, he said, promotes sportsmanship and honor, characteristics long associated with the martial arts.
Sponsors believe the IFL's team structure opens up broader marketing possibilities than Otto and Shamus would've had if they focused solely on individual fighters. Fans from a particular region can develop long-term allegiances to a team, some of whose members might become stars, the thinking goes. And sponsors are attracted to the notion of long-term allegiances.
"I think those are aspects that make it very interesting for us as a sponsor, and I think they have a lot of potential," said Bill Nielsen, senior director for global partnerships for Microsoft's Xbox gaming unit, an early sponsor. "If it keeps developing at the pace it has been, we're going to be really excited that we got in early."
Xbox's logo is prominently displayed on the IFL's fighting mat.
In addition to ramping up marketing potential, the team structure will provide the IFL's fighters with regular salaries (in the mid-$20,000 range) and health benefits, and allow them to compete on a fixed schedule.
Indeed, it was the elements that benefited the fighters that were most important to Otto, an architectural designer and real estate investor from Haworth, for whom the IFL is essentially a labor of love.
A varsity wrestler at Bergenfield High School, Otto has been a fan and participant in mixed martial arts since childhood. He holds a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do.
The IFL grew out of Otto's disdain for the direction his beloved sport was taking as it grew in popularity over the past decade.
"The system was unbalanced. It was steered toward the benefit of the organization and not toward the athlete. It was always pretty much a one-sided deal," he said.
Otto, after joining forces with Shamus, decided to create a league in which the fighters would become full-time professional athletes, allowing them to give up the day jobs that paid the bills between fights.
Otto first introduced Shamus to the world of mixed martial arts in the spring of 2005. His potential partner was inspired.
Shamus, now of Tenafly, grew up collecting comic books and superhero action figures with his brothers in Rockland County.
After college, he founded a publishing company that has grown to five magazines, each geared toward adult fans of comic books, video games and superhero action figures. It's a demographic with lots of disposable income and free time, and one Shamus later discovered to be the same as that for professional mixed martial arts.
Shamus, whose flagship publication, Wizard, is a glossy monthly that bills itself as the magazine of comics, entertainment and pop culture, said he immediately saw the possibilities for leveraging his expertise in branding, marketing and advertising after hearing Otto's vision for the IFL.
"I'm in the male, 18-to-34 business," he said, pointing out that his magazines reach 3 million people each month. After seeing his first professional mixed martial arts event, Shamus said he viewed the fighters as "real life superheroes."
After raising $1.5 million by dipping into their own savings and by hitting up family and friends, the two began to pitch their idea to potential supporters from the mixed martial arts world.
In short order, they had lined up a who's who of mixed martial arts royalty. Primary among them was Kanji Inoki, an icon in Japan who fought Muhammad Ali to a draw in an exhibition match in 1976.
Inoki, Otto said, was impressed with the idea of providing the IFL's fighters salaries and benefits. "He said he thought it was an honorable idea," said Otto.
In addition to the salary, fighters can earn performance bonuses at each IFL event by participating in the evening's best fight, or throwing the best knockout punch, or forcing the best submission.
To attract coaches, Otto and Shamus offered them equity stakes in the company. The coaches were handpicked by the founders from an international network of longtime mixed martial arts competitors. Most of the coaches train in -- or perhaps even own -- one of the 30,000 MMA gyms in the U.S., and each was given free reign to tap into the local talent for their team rosters.
Brazilian Renzo Gracie, a 39-year-old former world champion who has traveled the globe to compete for $1,500 purses, was recruited to coach New York's Pitbulls. (IFL fight venues for 2007 have yet to be announced, but are expected to be held at sites of 3,000 to 9,000 seats.)
"I couldn't help but join him [Otto]. My whole life I've dreamed of this opportunity. With Kurt, I saw my youthful dream and I got onboard," Gracie said in an interview at the Manhattan training gym he owns in a teeming and sweaty basement on West 30th Street.
Gracie said the IFL's team concept appealed to him because, as a longtime coach and trainer, he has always pushed the virtues of teamwork. And on a practical level, the IFL is providing something he never had as a young fighter -- security.
"This is the most important part. These guys are actually generating jobs for coaches, trainers and fighters. Salaries and benefits -- these are things I didn't have. I had to put everything together myself to do what I loved," said Gracie.
Given the financial struggles of recent start-up leagues, the IFL has its skeptics.
"The odds are against them. They've got their work cut out for them. Time will take care of that, but they may not have much time," said John Antil, a professor of marketing at the University of Delaware who has studied sports marketing.
Otto and Shamus aren't concerned.
To increase access to investors, and to raise the IFL's visibility, Otto and Shamus are taking the league public this year through a reverse merger with a failed biotech company.
As a publicly traded company, the IFL will not only open itself to coverage in the financial press but also to scrutiny heretofore unheard of in the fight world, Shamus said.
"Now for the first time, there will be a transparency to our sport. Everything we've done hasn't been done before in this industry, which is why we believe we're going to be Number One," he said.
E-mail: prial@northjersey.com
* * *
Going public
In August, the IFL agreed to merge with failed biotech company Paligent Inc., whose shares trade in the over-the-counter market rather than on a major exchange. Once the merger is completed this year, the IFL will emerge as the surviving company and its stock will be publicly traded.
Other publicly held sports/entertainment leagues include the United States Basketball League, a training ground for the NBA, and World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., the Stanford, Conn.-based professional wrestling empire.
Professional teams that have sold shares of their stock include the Green Bay Packers, the Boston Celtics, the Cleveland Indians and the Florida Panthers.
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qst ... k3MDExNjM3 (http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyJmZnYmVs N2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3MDExNjM3)