UFC fighter Kajan Johnson made a name for himself at this past weekend’s UFC Athlete Retreat.
The UFC invited its entire roster to Las Vegas to attend seminars and do other activities.
During the retreat, UFC sponsors had representatives talk to the fighters. While the Reebok representative was speaking, Johnson stood up and asked questioned about the deal.
Johnson talked about his experience during a recent episode of The MMA Hour.
“I’m sitting there getting more and more pissed off. And then eventually I had enough and I stood up and I was just like, I just have a question for the Reebok guy, I want to know, because I understand the deal was good for you, did great things for your company, I understand the deal was great for the UFC because it shows they could get corporate sponsorship, which led to the, was one of the things that led to them selling for such a high price tag, but, the fighters, you guys took 80 percent of my sponsorship dollars, and that’s the lower end, not the higher end, a lot of guys the higher up on the card got a lot more money taken from them. So you took food off our plates, so I want to know how you can justify that, I want to know how you sleep at night?”
Johnson was then escorted out of the presentation. However, he, and other UFC fighters later got the opportunity to discuss their grievances.
“Actually, it ended up pretty positive really. Because after they sat me down, they took a huge list of every single grievance that I have with the game of MMA to date, which is a lot, I just got back from DC, I was lobbying for the Ali Act, in Congress right before I went to the athlete retreat, so I have a lot of grievances. There’s a lot that’s I see that’s wrong with the way they’re conducting business in this game. And so that happened and then after that, that led to them calling a whole ‘nother meeting with all the fighters, sitting us down in a room, and having an open, honest, back and forth two-way discussion, which I don’t think has ever even happened before. It was amazing, the outcome of that was incredible.”
Johnson then shared some examples of what other fighters at the retreat had to say.
“All these other fighters started speaking up. Sara McMann had a whole bunch of different solutions that she was proposing, Joe Lauzon was calling them out and asking for transparency in the numbers of the Reebok deal so we can really believe when they’re saying that all the money is going to the fighters, all these different things were proposed and they seemed actually truly empathetic to our situation, upset that we weren’t happy with the current deal and wanting to work around that deal in whatever capacity they could, to make it better for these next four years that we’re still involved with Reebok so we’re happy so that Reebok will actually want to sign that deal again, because right now I don’t think they’re very happy with the press that they’re getting from this deal, right?”
