Alves, Floyd and the Scale

There is going to be a lot of discussion behind the scenes at the UFC about the importance of Thiago Alves (16-7 MMA, 9-3 UFC, #3 IWMMAR) missing weight. I care less about that than many of the other writers. It’s hard to see Alves being considered a serious force in the welterweight division long term. He’s missed weight twice in the last four fights and just had his second loss in a row. Both of those losses came to great fighters, and Alves should remain the number three guy in that division for now, but if he’s struggling with weight at 26 (and we know the cut only gets harder as fighters get older) he’s not going to be able to stay at welterweight for long.

And no one should expect Alves to be a force at middleweight. The division is radically different, there are fewer wrestlers to pin him down for fifteen minutes at a time, but a striker who’s 5’9 with a 70 inch reach is going to have a hard time being relevant when he’s giving up six inches of reach and three to five inches of height every time he steps in the cage, not to mention the difference in physical size between himself and the guys close to his own height, like Rousimar Palhares (11-2 MMA, 4-1 UFC).

All cynicism about Alves’ future aside, the thing that I find some combination of irritating and curious is the way in which Alves missing weight was handled by the UFC. Flying back from my vacation with my family, I got talking to a family member about a piece in the New Yorker on the Mayweather vs. Mosely fight. She was shocked that Floyd was fined six hundred thousand dollars for missing two pounds at the weigh in, totally 2% of his purse of the night. Not to trivialize a $600,000 penalty (much, much more than I make in a year) but it’s worth keeping in mind how small time that is to a guy who’s getting paid $30 million for the bout. After all, Alves was fined 20% of his purse for coming in half a pound over.

Its hard for me to tell what bothers me most about it. Is it that Alves is making about 0.5% of what Floyd made to fight Mosely? Probably. He got paid $60,000 to fight Georges St. Pierre at UFC 100. Is it that Mayweather got paid $30 million and missed weight? Joe Rogan used to get people to eat deer penis for a fraction of that. Or is it that the UFC contracts impose important stiff penalties to top tier fighters making a fraction of what the top tier boxers are making, while the boxers have no fear of retribution for missing weight? $600,000 could by Floyd a couple more awesome cars, or a lot of hookers, but he doesn’t need the money.

There is a style of penalty that I do like, which is the penalty Strikeforce implemented when Cristiane Santos (10-1 MMA, #1 IWMMAR) missed weight before the fight against Hitomi Akano (15-7 MMA, #4 IWMMAR). The 20% fine seems a little excessive, but giving half of that to Akano seemed about right, especially given the gratuitous amount of weight she was off by. Still, there ought to be some discussion in both the boxing and MMA community about how these fines ought to work. To have a standard 20% fine misses the gradation difference between missing a half pound, like Alves, and missing by five and a half, like Santos. The per-pound fine implemented by some boxing contracts is definitely worth looking into.

And on the other hand, boxing promoters ought to look into making the fines reasonable for the fighters, so that they actually discourage missing weight, instead of a ceremonial sort of fine like the inconsequential percentage offered to Mayweather. 20% of Mayweather’s purse, $6 million for those who don’t want to do the division, may have been excessive, but would probably have worked to discourage him. Even 10%, with some percentage of that going to Mosely, would have seemed more significant than what was initially on the table.