Openly promoting a guy who has one or two professional fights as having “world class striking” in main events on CBS and the face of a company is COMPLETELY different than taking a fighter with a few professional fights under his belt and putting him through the developmental process to gauge his talents. Yes, both are harnessing his power of popularity, but the vetting process and the more incremental build while Slice achieves quality wins by demonstrating actual ability against the next stage of opposition is an entirely, entirely different animal.

If you want to keep equating the two, be my guest, but you’ll be on a lonely island. They are similar only in the most basic general way of observation. They are not the same.

Oh, ok. So let’s not hope he becomes a token fighter too soon then :).

Awesome.

Is Johnson confirmed for season 10? That would be great.

The money is always important but at some point you have to at least pretend it’s about the sport or there will be no future money to be made off it. Shaw (like most boxing promoters) is about getting paid now instead of building up for the long haul. Shaw doesn’t want to create anything that last he just wants to fill his bank account today and that is a real difference here.

The old probverb about teaching a man to fish, well Shaw would sell the fish and the fishing equipment, put the money in his pocket and go on to hustle someone else.

I’m not defending White here at all, although I think it’s hilarious that your default setting is to accuse people of being UFC fanboys when they disagree with you. People can readily see that Zuffa is out to make money, that is no an issue at all. The thing is that they can also see that Zuffa is trying to make money by taking MMA mainstream and building a powerful brand instead of trying to make a quick buck off a fad. Perhaps if you took off your “I hate Dana White googles” and looked at things unbiasedly you could see things like that.

Here is the real deal, we don’t have to devolve into any “what if” scenerio’s here because we already know what kind of promoter Gary Shaw is, we have years of boxing promotion to look at. We know exactly what kind of fight promoter Shaw would be because he has plenty of history to look at. If Shaw and White had changed places and Shaw had bought the UFC in 2001 then there would be no UFC today because he would of killed it and stuck with boxing, he didn’t have any interest at all in MMA until after it hit the big time and started making money and he damn sure wasn’t going to pump any of his own money into trying to make it work back when it was unpopular. Dana White and the Fertitta’s invested tens of millions of dollars and years of their lives to build what they have today and they continue to pump money into the future of that company too, Gary Shaw is trying to earn a buck off the top of stuff that is already there. Yes they are both after the money but if you can’t see the glaring difference between building something that makes money and taking advantage of a sport to fill your pockets then that is sort of sad.

I’m a blasphemer

Well you are a Demon Prince/Undead/God.