This Day in MMA: Third Time Not a Charm

One year ago today - August 1, 2009 - Affliction Entertainment was scheduled to put on its third PPV event, the appropriately named Affliction: Trilogy.

Affliction Entertainment - an independent subsidiary branch of Affliction Clothing - entered the MMA promotion landscape with its first PPV event roughly a year prior, July 19th 2008. The card was the stuff of hardcore fans' dreams: a main event of Fedor Emelianenko (then world #1 heavyweight) vs. ex-UFC world champion Tim Sylvia was the main event capping a card also featuring Andrei Arlovski, Ben Rothwell, Josh Barnett, Renato Sobral, Matt Lindland, Vitor Belfort, Antonio Rogerio Nogueria, and others.  The show featured an equally ostentatious payroll - compare its $2,866,000 base pay to the recent UFC 116's $923,000: three times the payroll for only a fraction of the PPV sales.

Affliction's second event was originally scheduled for October 11, 2008, in Las Vegas, but a month before the scheduled event, Affliction rescheduled the event for January 24, 2009 in Anaheim. Fedor and Arlovski were again on the card - this time facing one another - and most of the big names from the first event were also on this card.  The reported payroll for this event was even higher - $3.3 million - for an estimated 100k-200k PPV buys.

With the company undeterred by its meager (which is to say negative) return on investment, they scheduled the third event, Affliction: Trilogy, for August 1st, 2009.  The event was to return to the Honda Center in Anaheim, California - site of the first two events - and was to feature a long-awaited heavyweight tilt between Fedor Emelienenko and Josh Barnett, the longtime top-10-ranked heavyweight.

However, with fan interest in the hardcore-friendly card running high, and speculation building regarding the long-awaited Fedor-Barnett tilt, Affliction VP Tom Atencio reported on July 22nd that Josh Barnett was off of the card due to having tested positive for anabolic steroids in a pre-fight drug test - the second time Barnett had failed a drug test with a US sanctioning athletic commission.

A great amount of chaos ensued in the following 48 hours, with various opponents named as rumored or prospective replacements vs. Fedor in the main event - among them Vitor Belfort, Brett Rogers and Fabricio Werdum, the latter two of whom Emelianenko has since gone on to fight in the Strikeforce organization.  However, in the whirlwind of activity and negotiations Affliction decided to scrap the event altogether and then to shutter its doors as a fight promotion, returning only to merchandise and fighter sponsorship. In explaining the decision, Tom Atencio told MMAWeekly Radio:

We were scrambling looking for a fighter, quite a few guys stepped up to the plate who were wanting the fight...but just after talking to Showtime, after talking to everybody involved, it just, we couldn't have done it...[w]e just did not have the time to re-market whoever was coming up. We could not have changed the commercials for all the pay-per-view providers. We couldn't have changed any billboards or put up anything saying main event changed or anything like that. We could not have risked the fact that somebody ordered it thinking that Barnett vs. Fedor was the main event.

The ramifications - for the industry and for fighters - were wide-ranging.  Affliction had several of the world's top 20 fighters in multiple weight classes - especially heavyweight - under contract.  During the period when they were promoting events as their own organization, they had been banned from sponsoring any UFC fighters.  The latter subject was settled as part of the decision to close the doors on Affliction Entertainment - the UFC and Affliction reached an agreement to allow Affliction to return as a UFC sponsor.  In time the fighter contracts resolved themselves: Renato Sobral vs. Gegard Mousasi became a Strikeforce light heavyweight title fight; Jay Hieron fought on the same card; and Zuffa (UFC and WEC both) cherry-picked the Affliction fighters it wanted which included LC Davis, Javier Vasquez, Mark Hominick, Deividas Taurosevicius, Ben Rothwell, Vitor Belfort, Paul Daley, Dan Lauzon, and Rafaello Oliveira.  On the organizational front, Strikeforce became the clear-cut #2 MMA organization in the United States following the demise of Affliction.

A radical shift in the talent pool and overall MMA landscape, all precipitated by the collapse and cancellation of Affliction Trilogy which was scheduled for one year ago today.