Mention PRIDE or EliteXC to any long-time MMA fan and, good, bad, or ugly, you’re virtually guaranteed to get an emotional response. Mention an amateur show and you surely won’t get the same response, but there’s a good chance that same fan has been to a local theater, gym, or hell, a badminton club where the sport’s future talent gets locked into a smaller cage to develop their skills.
Amateur shows aren’t as glamorous, but they’re absolutely critical to the sport’s future *cough, CM Punk, cough, cough*. They give fighters the opportunity to – as Big John McCarthy puts it – learn what it’s like to be a fighter: what it’s like in the back, how to walkout and listen to the referee and their coaches, to see what worked and what didn’t from training, to evaluate their mistakes, and to see if they might have what it takes to go far in the sport.
Build your resume in amateurs and hopefully move on to the pros and to bigger and bigger promotions. That’s the way it’s supposed to go – for fighters as well as employees of the fight game. Not for Turi Altavilla and Jay Tan. They’ve worked behind the scenes of the big shows but now find joy and fulfillment helping prepare MMA’s future talent for what’s next at L.A.’s premier amateur MMA promotion, U of MMA.
Altavilla, the CEO, and Tan, the matchmaker, recently sat down with Bloody Elbow to discuss how and why they went from PRIDE to the amateurs.
Bloody Elbow: How did you get your start in the MMA industry?
Turi Altavilla: My MMA career started about two years after college. I was always a big sports fan and kind of a casual MMA fan. Like most males my age, I knew who Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie were. I was a big boxing fan and pro wrestling, WWF fan, so I think MMA was real easy for me to like.
I was just figuring out what I wanted to do with life and had an opportunity to work a show in late-1999, early-2000 was my first show. It was King of the Cage 2. I was just kind of thrown into this world and fell in love with it. It was just something that all of us wanted it to grow. We were this very passionate motley crew of people and King of the Cage was doing some outstanding shows and I got to be a part of around 15 of the first shows.
BE: How did land your first show with King of the Cage?
Altavilla: I was working for a production company that worked on a myriad of different projects and one of the ones that came up was King of the Cage and that’s how I met the owner, Terry Trebilcock, and worked for him for almost three years. I learned so much of what I needed to know in terms of how to run an event and I also met all the people that I needed to know.
There were all kinds of journalists at the time that were running their tiny little blogs that would go on to do much bigger things [laughs]. And then all the managers were there, all the fighters were there, the Bas Rutten’s, the Tito Ortiz’s, and the management teams, other promoters, the Tapout guys. So every time we would do a show, it was this gathering of MMA personalities, almost like some kind of convention or something. And I just got thrown into this world and fell in love with the sport, but I also fell in love with a lot of the people.
BE: So you’re working 15 or so shows with King of the Cage. How did your opportunity with PRIDE come about?
Altavilla: That came about because King of the Cage and PRIDE had a, I wouldn’t say quite a partnership, but there was a lot of association and collaboration, especially with fighters. They would occasionally send Japanese fighters to fight in our shows and we would sometimes send fighters out there. Rampage Jackson is probably the one with the most notoriety, but there were a few others. There were fighters going both ways, and I was able to meet Sakakibara and some of the PRIDE staff and it came to the point where they said they’re going to expand into the U.S. and I should come work for them. I was a PRIDE fan at the time and it was like signing with your favorite basketball team.
It was a big opportunity in terms of being given much bigger role, a bigger title. But it was hard to leave King of the Cage because I really liked who I was working with and I liked the environment. It was hard to leave. PRIDE was a new environment where I was the only American, and it took a lot of adjusting. My job was to prepare them to come to the U.S. and do events. I got to go to plenty of shows in Japan which were obviously remarkable and fun and historic, but we know how that ended.
After that, I picked up with ProElite thinking there would be a great opportunity there, what they were building, the money they had raised, the broadcast partners they had. I’m quite proud of a lot of the things we did. I was around for something like 17 or 18 shows, between the ShoXC and bigger EliteXC shows. I’m definitely proud of a lot of the things we did but I’ll always feel that it was a wasted opportunity.
BE: How so?
Altavilla: I see PRIDE as kind of tragic, but ProElite as a terribly wasted opportunity because at the time we had a chance to change the MMA landscape which is nearly impossible to do today. When PRIDE ended, it hurt. There was a history there and it was beloved. ProElite wasn’t around long enough for people to love, but it was definitely a wasted opportunity given the resources we had. We just weren’t able to turn it around in time before the hourglass of the money went away, but we were trying. We were doing so many things right in terms of mixing up between the showmanship that people like in MMA, that PRIDE had, having fighters that were not going to necessarily going to be world champions but put butts in seats and attracted a lot of attention for the fighters that were world-class – the Robbie Lawler’s, the Nick Diaz’s. We were also pioneers in women’s MMA when it was a lot more controversial.
There were a lot of things we did right and definitely plenty of things we did wrong. It was a lesson learned for me. Each company taught me a lesson, and the lesson I learned from ProElite was it’s one thing to be able to manage an event but it’s a different thing to be able to manage a company. That’s what inspired me to go to business school, learn how to run a company, and earn my MBA.
BE: What were your positions at these companies?
Altavilla: Well when I started at King of the Cage I was, I don’t know, Minion? Slave? I started at the very bottom. My title ultimately evolved into Production Manager. I pretty much was involved in a little bit of everything except the matchmaking. King of the Cage was my introduction to the sport and learning about the events and networking. By the time I got to PRIDE, I had more experience, more confidence, and they gave me my first executive title as VP of both Production and Marketing. I was wearing so many hats at that company because our U.S. office was small.
BE: For PRIDE USA?
Altavilla: Yes. The office was small. Our job was to push PRIDE in the U.S. in order to have events here. My frustration with PRIDE was that we didn’t really have American events. We only came to the U.S. at the end because the company was desperate, not because they were really looking to expand. I was always frustrated and angry about that because I felt that we had a real opportunity to compete with the UFC. That could’ve made a real difference when things went bad in Japan had we been more established here. You don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
It ended up being too late and I was always very upset by that. But, in terms of my career, it was a blessing in disguise. I came in as a guy who knew how to run events. Because we weren’t doing events, I was doing other things. I started getting involved in a lot of business transactions the company was a part of, everything from TV deals and home video deals and website stuff. I started learning about MMA from a different point of view. It made me much more well-rounded as a person in MMA. I knew how the shows were run but now I knew a lot more about the business side.
And there was a lot of marketing, too. I was working with pay-per-view providers for all of the deliverables from graphics and poster designs. We had American posters but also had the Japanese posters. American posters were made more for the American audience. It was a little more traditional than just throwing a shark on a poster or showing sperm or whatever the PRIDE posters had [laughs]. We couldn’t sell fights here in the United States with a poster that was just sperm.
Tan: If that’s not a sidebar quote, I don’t know what is.
Altavilla: It was my responsibility to sell the fights in a more traditional way. So as most PRIDE fans know, there were two sets of posters. I couldn’t make the American posters as quirky and cool as the Japanese ones. Trust me, I love them. But you can’t sell fights that way to a mainstream American audience. It doesn’t work.
I ended up handling some of the business stuff at PRIDE which then segued into ProElite and continued. I wanted to be more involved on the fight side when I got to ProElite but discovered that they needed more help on the business side. They had a fight team that was basically a bureaucracy. They had a conference room and everybody would sit around the conference room and argue. It just wasn’t the right way to do things.
BE: It sounds like a fight committee.
Altavilla: Yeah, it was like the fight committee. We were trying to change that at the end. I don’t think it’s the way that a healthy company operates. At the UFC, you know where the buck stops. It stops with Dana and Lorenzo, and Joe Silva’s in there, too. So the three of them can argue about stuff but they know that probably, I would assume, Lorenzo makes the final decision. There always has to be someone who makes the final decision in any company, good or bad. At ProElite, there wasn’t anyone who made a final decision and it made it very, very difficult, which is one of many reasons why the company didn’t succeed.
[Writers note: This interview was conducted prior to the UFC’s sale to WME-IMG.]
BE: How did you get into the MMA industry, Jay?
Tan: I’d always been a fan of pro wrestling. I’d been reading Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer since high school, 1988 or something like that. I knew about MMA. I read about it but didn’t really follow it. I’m working for a production company and Randy Couture and his manager at the time [Jeremy Lappen] come in to meet with a director for potential movie opportunities and stuff like that. I’d met a few celebrities in passing, actors and stuff like that, but nowhere was I in awe as much as I was of Randy.
I was pretty unhappy and disillusioned with Hollywood as an industry, so I knew I had to figure something else out because it’s not a healthy existence at all. When I met Randy and his manager, and his manager is actually cool, I said, “This is a business I can actually sink my teeth into.” I know about it. The stars are very similar to pro wrestling. And I dabbled a little bit wrestling as well but I knew that’s an industry where nobody makes any money. MMA was still on the upswing so there was the opportunity to potentially make money. This was a couple years before The Ultimate Fighter hit. There was still that potential and opportunity. And that’s when I knew I wanted to jump into MMA.
I consider my first real job in MMA in November 2005 when I started working full-time for Jeremy as a Junior Manager. He had guys like Randy Couture, Bas Rutten, Ken Shamrock, Rampage, Mayhem Miller. There was a lot of great potential for us right at that point. By March 2006, he says, “I’ve been hired to revive the WFA. We’re going to be fight promoters now.” And I’m thinking, shit, I’ve barely got my feet wet with managing and now we’re going to be on the big business side of it. Alright, we’ll run with it.
2006, thrown into the fire with WFA. Running a show was new to us but we made it through. We did one show in July of 2006 which was King of the Streets, Rampage vs. Matt Lindland and Bas Rutten’s return out of retirement. We were just trying to get that one show done and then figure it out from there. By today’s standards that show would’ve been quite a big hit. We had over 3,000 people at The Forum. Pay-per-view wasn’t great but it’s comparable to what WWE is doing now. It was a bomb at that point, unfortunately. And we got bought out by the UFC in December of 2006.
We had a second show planned but it kept getting postponed. The funny thing is we had guys signed for that, we had signed Gina Carano, Urijah Faber. The first match I ever made was going to be for the next WFA show, Carlos Condit vs. Jose Landi-Jons, I signed both of them and it never got to fruition [laughs]. So all of these guys that we signed ended up with the UFC. They officially bought us the same day they announced WEC’s purchase.
By end of January 2007, Turi and I spoke earlier in the year. He said he needed help. I said I need a job.
Altavilla: The thing that was attractive about Jay coming into PRIDE was that people may see that WFA show as a failure, and he’ll be the first to tell you like he already did that it was a new experience and going through the fire you understand what it takes to get a show like that off the ground. It’s not glamorous, it’s a grind, and I knew he knew that and that’s why I wanted to work with him. We know what happened with PRIDE, and Jay was a part of the last few shows.
Tan: I got about six or seven months of PRIDE experience.
BE: When we get to the end of EliteXC, how did a move into the amateurs and the creation of U of MMA come about?
Altavilla: A couple of our colleagues from ProElite – Jeremy Lappen and JT Steele – ended up starting CAMO, the California Amateur Mixed Martial Arts Organization, which is basically like a junior commission to CSAC handling amateurs. And they approached both of us to be their first lead inspectors because they were starting from scratch and they knew that we both had extensive live-event experience.
I can’t speak for Jay but I know I didn’t want to do it. Being on the regulation side sounds like the most un-fun portion of the business. Like you’re basically just wagging your finger at people telling them what to do. [Laughs]
Tan: It was a stopgap point for me to stay in the sport.
Altavilla: I just didn’t want to do it. I had no interest in doing it. I think we both did it out of friendship to Jeremy and JT because they were starting out. We started up as lead inspectors learning the process of what they have to handle at a show. We knew that no promoter was going to be able to pull anything off on us. We knew what their agendas could be and the all the tricks. We came up through that and started training other inspectors, teaching them everything that we knew and certainly they were learning from CAMO as well. It ended up being a rewarding experience seeing the business from a very different perspective.
We went to enough shows and we started to see that they really weren’t good shows and we were just like, “Man, what are we doing? We should be doing this.”
Tan: There was no identity or long-term game plan with any of these shows. It was just a series of one-offs. Let’s get this show done, let’s get this show done.
Altavilla: We had to rally around something. And it had to be a vision that we believed in and a brand and a look. That was important to me. After ProElite, I didn’t want to be a mercenary in the industry. I need to be with a company that has a vision, has a plan, and we can start looking at where are we going to be in two years, four years, seven years or whatever? As long as you have a vision and can start following a path, things make more sense to me.
We looked at the landscape of MMA and said where does the sport need the most help and what are our strengths? Jay and I both really enjoy working with younger fighters. We’ve worked with the best-of-the-best, but what satisfied us at the end of the day was working with these young fighters, helping them start the journey. There’s just something really rewarding about it and enjoyable. To know that your time with these fighters is limited because obviously they have to move on, but that you’re a critical part of their development and then they leave the nest and you work with the next crop of fighters.
We want them to learn. Not necessarily inside the cage because they do have their coaches, but we feel it’s important that they learn outside of the cage. Everything from marketing and nicknames and ring-walk music, that can even go into more serious topics like health and strategies for their careers.
Jay and I like spending time with them doing that, helping them understand. That was a big part of why we named our promotion U of MMA, because we’re dealing with amateur fighters and it’s a place for them to learn.
Tan: Younger fighters, we’re not looking to control them, but we are looking to guide and help them. We have less of that to offer to older guys than to younger guys who don’t have that same experience. And to that end, we’ve gotten a great deal of loyalty and affection from the fight community in general because they know that we’re two guys that are not going to just use the kids as cash cows. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure they get something out of the experience, win or lose.
Altavilla: And not only that, we work with these fighters when they’re amateurs and often times they’re still asking us for advice and help well into their early pro careers. We don’t really get anything out of it directly but we love to do it.
Tan: We’re contributing to the next generation of fighters and of stars.
Altavilla: We want to see them develop. We want to see them do well. We’re looking to formalize some of the things that we teach them. Everybody wants the next star, but nobody really puts the time into helping them become that star. It’s not always about the fighters that make it. It’s about the fighters that could’ve made it but don’t, and we see plenty of that. We feel that amateur MMA is such a critical part of a fighter’s development but is given the least amount of attention overall in the business. And we’re looking to change that.
BE: CAMO was the spark, and you’re sitting there deciding to do your own thing. What were you thinking back then in terms of how you were going to be different?
Tan: Hmmm. Cool logo. No black, no red, no skulls, no flames, no chains.
BE: No sperm?
Tan: Yeah. Well, no, we were open to that. We were open to PRIDE posters.
Altavilla: And that’s actually a good point because a couple of our first posters were a little bit more PRIDE-ish. Japanese.
Tan: We hired a Japanese artist.
Altavilla: Our plan originally was we thought amateur fighters aren’t well known to the public, so it’s hard to sell them as so-and-so vs. so-and-so. With the posters, we wanted to hire a different artist for every show that could put something beautiful together that would help us promote and that people would want to keep the posters because they were great. What we found was that artists take too long and they’re hard to find. It was going to be a lot of work to us to keep finding new artists to use. It was just too much work so we ended up going back to a traditional fight poster model.
To go back to your original question, first we felt that the brand was important. We had to come up with something that looked different and felt different, and was memorable. The name was going to be super important because there were so many little shows that we experienced all over the country that were not memorable. They’re all pretty much generic and cut from the same cloth. You have shitty heavy metal, barbed wire, and skulls and it was all kind of the same formula.
We felt that the name of the product has to be in the name of the show, so that was part of U of MMA, as opposed to kind of being lazy and all these companies being something FC. And “Fighting Championships” was not descriptive enough. We wanted to make sure we made something that if you saw the name or the colors you would automatically associate it with us. And when we looked at the landscape, the color that wasn’t used was dark, dark, purple. Everybody was using red or yellow or black or silver. It was always some variation of that. We were like, let’s pick a color that no one had every used. And I’m a Laker fan also, so. But the purple came up and people really dig it.
It was that and coming up with a bigger vision than just doing shows. A lot of amateur promotions just do shows. They pitch the tent, have a few fights, and go home. But this is a lifestyle for us. I think there’s more of a community feel to things and that was very much on purpose. Even if these are all gyms that are fighting each other, we wanted to constantly remind them that it’s not about just fighting each other.
When you get to the UFC, I think everybody likes those mad dog faceoffs and the trash talking. And we get it, that’s how you sell fights. We don’t want that at our shows, not at the amateur level. You’re not necessarily here to start grudge matches and rivalries and stuff like that. You’re here to start the journey of your fight career and learn.
Tan: It’s very easy for the guys at this level to take themselves too seriously. Here’s the time for them to calm down, not feel that pressure, and really get a sense of what being a fighter is about which is showing up on weight, focusing on effective training, and those awkward moments when you’re in the same 5-foot radius as the guy you fought previously. If you mad dogged him the last show, now what are you going to do? But if you both were sportsmen the first time around, that awkward position is not an awkward position the last time.
Altavilla: We’re really trying to sincerely help them in every way we can in terms of getting their journey off to a good start and hopefully expediting the process of learning. I saw a lot of pro fighters that I had worked with at PRIDE and other big companies that there were certain lessons that they got too late. There’s so much for a fighter to learn outside of the cage that can make a big difference in their careers if they just understood them earlier.
Like marketing or doing interviews. Some fighters just don’t want to do them. And I think a guys who happily got it later in his career was Robbie Lawler. And I had worked with Robbie a lot. We had talks before about it like, “Dude, you gotta talk more. You gotta do these interviews.” Your job isn’t just to show up in the cage, perform, and then go home. You are your own brand. It’s all on you.
In the promotions that Robbie was doing in the UFC, I started seeing that his face was happy. He was way more open in talking with journalists. We were exchanging texts and I said I was so happy for him, what changed? He was like, “I got it.”
BE: Heading into your first show, you’re just starting your new business. What was the most important thing you felt you had to get done or were worried about?
Altavilla: We hoped that the truck carrying the cage wouldn’t crash or have a flat tire. I’m half kidding but I’m not. If we didn’t have the cage, we wouldn’t have a show. And it’s not like when you’re a big show where the cage is nearby or you can set it up the day before. We only had the venue for that day and if it was late, it was going to have a domino effect of crap.
Getting the gyms on board was maybe part of it, too. I don’t think we saw it necessarily as a challenge because we both had our own network. We knew a lot of the gyms already. But I think what we learned was it wasn’t about the big gyms we knew, the Team Quest’s and the Legends MMA. It was about all the other little mom and pop gyms that we had to meet. We had been used to working with the big gyms, not the little gyms, and we had to spend a lot of time making those connections, building the relationships.
Tan: To me, the fighters and the fight gyms were kind of like our customers because we’re the ones asking them to come fight for us. Now a lot of them want that opportunity, but at that point we’re unproven as a brand and as a show. We’re asking to please give us a chance. To do that, I knew that our show needed to be better than any other and kids had to have a good experience.
BE: For an amateur show, your venue is extremely nice. How did you find it and strike a deal with the owners?
Altavilla: We had been doing events at the Avalon which is a small venue in Hollywood. You can fit maybe 500-600 at the most. We needed to get to a bigger venue. We looked around the city and it’s not always easy to find really great venues that are within 1,500-2,000 seats. And we discovered AEG’s Club Nokia [now called The Novo] and we knew we’re not going to sell it out right away but thought we could grow into it. It took quite a while to get the deal done. They didn’t know who we were, but we stuck to it. They gave us a shot and we’ve since produced almost 20 shows there and they’ve been fantastic partners.
BE: Do fighters have contracts with you guys? Any exclusive contracts like the pros?
Altavilla: Just bout agreements.
Tan: That’s what I was saying about taking yourself too seriously at this lower level. An amateur fighter should not be exclusive. Give me a break.
Altavilla: The way we’ve approached it is if we create the best platform, they’re just going to want to fight for us anyway.
BE: And fighters leaving you for the pros is actually a good thing, right? It makes you look good.
Altavilla: Yeah, it is. And that brings up a good point. A lot of people say that amateur MMA can be exploitive. These guys aren’t getting paid. But what they also don’t realize is that there are other challenges amateur promoters have to deal with that we didn’t know with going in, we had to learn. One of them is that you’re sometimes dealing with fighters who are way more flaky. They can drop off the fight card at the drop of a hat.
Tan: At a moment’s notice for the dumbest reasons.
Altavilla: I broke up with my girlfriend or they had a hard day of training. Things like that where if you’re going to take your career seriously there are valid excuses and not valid excuses. Some people don’t really want to be fighters; they just want people to see them as a fighter. As that date gets closer, often times they start getting more nervous and you’re in danger of that fighter pulling out. That causes mayhem on your fight card. It’s unfair to the opponent who’s been doing everything right.
That’s one challenge that we have all the time. The second one is you can find a fighter who has top-level talent and can put butts in seats. When we find those fighters, they’re going to go away. You know your time with them is limited. It’s up to us to find that next fighter, and it’s a lot of hard work. One way of looking at it is okay you’re not paying them, but it’s also a tremendous amount of extra work dealing with a very different fight animal than the level we worked with at these much bigger shows.
This is the most rewarding thing that I’ve ever done in my MMA career. Even more rewarding than PRIDE. PRIDE has a legacy and history but you know what? PRIDE’s dead. It’s a carcass in the ground. I know for a fact that we have amateur fighters who don’t even know what it is, because they don’t. It’s dead. And the best thing a fight promotion can do is be alive, because you’re servicing the fighters and the community. We’ve got a great vision and we’re helping fighters as much as we can and that, to me, is more rewarding than anything I’ve done in the past.
Tan: You may not know this reference but when he said PRIDE is dead, if that goes into the article, that’s going to be the MMA equivalent of when Tupac did his Vibe interview and pointed the finger of the shooter at Biggie. Turi just said PRIDE is dead. #PRIDENeverDies. Wow, this shit just got scandalous.
BE: May not know this reference? You better recognize 90’s hip hop Dr. Gift, Jay!
Your journeys through the MMA industry have been part fascinating, part trip down memory lane. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and helping develop the future of our great sport.
Watch the next U of MMA Fight Night show at 5:00pm on Sunday, Nov. 13 at The Novo (formerly Club Nokia) if you’re in the Los Angeles area and want more MMA action after the UFC 205 card. Follow Turi on Twitter @TuriAltavilla, Jay @jaytan716, and U of MMA @UofMMA. Paul is Bloody Elbow’s analytics and business writer and a licensed MMA judge with CAMO. Follow him @MMAanalytics.