There’s a predictable script that comes with complaints about fighter pay these days. Actually, maybe it’s more like a flowchart. Is the complaining fighter in question a former UFC employee, now making his living elsewhere? If so, then you can count on hearing UFC president Dana White dismiss him as another UFC washout still smacking his lips over sour grapes. Is the fighter retired or inactive or so high up the food chain that he can’t be brushed off as an inconsequential malcontent? In that case, hey, everyone wants to make more money. But in the case of current UFC fighters, such as Tim Kennedy , who recently compared MMA fighter pay – unfavorably, just in case you were wondering – to a job “empty[ing] trash cans,” that’s when we can sit back and wait for the inevitable backtracking . Two days after Kennedy called that state of fighter pay “pathetic” in an interview with the GrappleTalk podcast, he apologized in a Facebook statement where he called his own choice of words “poor” and “not properly informed.” He also claimed his comments were “taken out of context,” which is athlete-speak for, “I didn’t realize I was going to get in trouble.” Just so we’re all clear, the context was Kennedy being asked whether fighters who have outside jobs can still be fully committed to MMA, and then responding by saying that they kind of need them, since the current state of fighter pay is “pathetic.” Kennedy was the one who brought up the issue in the first place , and it seems logical to assume that he didn’t spontaneously change his position in the two days between when his comments went public and when he issued the apology.
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Somewhere between complaints and apologies, real discussion on fighter pay waits – MMA Junkie