He’s getting $2 million every time he plays golf.

Even Jake Shields, he gets on the mat, he still moves - right? - but then he comes out and you’re just like, ‘Bro, what was this sport done to you? And at what cost?’ You look at golf, this last golf, a guy just signed $120 million one-year contract. Physically, orthopedically, I’m sure if you watched Mark or Dan Henderson try to walk around.

There are lots of athletes, their cognitive decline from how they performed in the ring. You’ve been in the sport long enough to know athletes, that, they’re broken. It is so disingenuous to ask these guys to put not just their - they’re putting their health on the line for forever. Everything’s bigger, except for the fighter pay,” Kennedy said. “Athletes are making less money comparatively. His experiences gave him perspective on what life was like both inside the UFC and outside of it, and though he’s now shifted to a different phase of his career - Kennedy is currently promoting his new book Scars and Stripes, which documents his extensive military career as well as his MMA run - he remains a fan of the sport he competed in for nearly two decades.

Kennedy, 42, retired from active competition in early 2017 following a 15-year MMA career that saw him fight for virtually every major North American promotion of his era, from the UFC and Strikeforce to the IFL and WEC. So the guys that you saw as the face of it, there were those, and then there were about another 25, and then we had a roster of 500 that didn’t.” We went to the major fight camps and it was like, ‘You have to sign this,’ and there was nothing besides, it’s two paragraphs that, ‘I want to be part of this organization and this organization will collectively go and address fighter issues.’ That’s what this document said, and there was such fear of the repercussions from the organization that nobody would do it. “And Dana White has such control on these athletes, when I said, ‘You have to sign that you’re a part of this organization, and then collectively we’ll all go back together and address healthcare, mental health, TBI, CTE, but we’ll all do it together,’ but as an athlete you had to have the courage to be like, ‘This is my name, and I believe that this is the right thing to do, and I might miss a fight because of this’ - five percent of the athlete roster would do it. “We needed athletes to agree to be part of this association, this union,” Kennedy explained during an in-studio appearance on The MMA Hour. So what actually happened with the MMAAA? Why did the group’s efforts go nowhere?įormer board member Kennedy addressed the topic Wednesday on The MMA Hour. Ultimately, the organization and its initial optimism died a quick and unceremonious death. By May 2017, Dillashaw and others were publicly bemoaning whether they had been led down the wrong path.

As time moved on, more cracks continued to appear within the organization, with the MMAAA having little action or results to show for its efforts. Within a week, Cerrone walked back some of his support for the movement, telling reporters during UFC 206 fight week that he’d spoken to UFC president Dana White and hadn’t exactly understood what he was signing up for. However, that early excitement didn’t last. The group was initially received with both skepticism and excitement by the MMA community, the former of which was largely due to Rebney’s involvement, but the latter of which was because the MMAAA marked the first time UFC fighters of such prominence as St-Pierre, Velasquez, and Cerrone had publicly stated their support for a unionization effort.

Tim kennedy