UFC buys Pride: Excitement and confusion
UFC president Dana White announced that his company’s long-rumored purchase of its top competitor, Pride, went through late last week.
Pride lost its TV clearance in Japan last year, which weakened the company financially. However, Pride still has a ton of strong talent. So now White has to choose from two ways to make a lot of money:
1. World Series. Keep the UFC and Pride talent separate, and have an annual supershow where the champions collide.
2. Bring all of the top stars of Pride to UFC. It looks like that’s what White is planning to do. He’s already begun setting up Pride light heavyweight champ Dan Henderson as the next challenger to new UFC champ Quentin Jackson.
White also talked about promoting another interpromotional battle, between UFC’s Chuck Liddell vs. Pride’s Wanderlei Silva. The thinking is that these matches are possible now, so why wait?
The problem with herding all of the top talent to UFC is that it makes Pride either a clear No. 2 promotion or totally obsolete. Here’s what I would do:
In each weight class, I would have an eight-man Pride tournament to earn a shot at the UFC title, and vice versa. I would also do the World Series show with neither title on the line. This way, both promotions would survive and look like major leagues – just like the American and National leagues in baseball.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:09 am
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