Craig Jones: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s amazing. It’s very considerate to the FloGrappling streaming platform, I believe, to have also a free alternative on the same weekend. And the brilliance of this whole thing is I was largely criticized for not knowing anything about business but the people criticizing me decided to host a tournament, a 15,000 seat arena, they decided to take sponsors, they decided to use a streaming platform which sells subscriptions based on the athletes that would enter it but not give any of the talent, the athletes, a contract which gave me this beautiful position to basically say, “Hey, what do you prefer? The prestige of an ADCC gold medal or money?” And that’s the feud so far and we put that out into the world. I didn’t chase too many athletes down. Obviously, a lot of these guys really need money. So, you throw a million dollars out there, people are jumping on board. So, initially we started getting, we got two local guys here in Austin, the Tackett brothers, they jumped in first and they’re great kids. They really legitimize the whole thing because, if we’d pick certain athletes, just B team guys straight away, it’s already looking a bit dodgy but we’ve got some legitimate athletes. Especially the under 80 kilo divisions, full of, minus two or three guys, that’s the best people in the world in that weight division. And as we started to grow our roster here, what happened, I’m going to say this, allegedly, for legal reasons, is that the first move ADCC did was they matched the female pay to the men’s pay. So, the women always traditionally got paid less, I think $6,000 for first place. As soon as we had Ffion Davies, the reigning champion, come across to do a super fight with us, bang, ADCC raised the prize money of the women’s division to equal the men’s. So, me, being a feminist activist throughout many of my years on this earth, immediately got women’s pay raised in the sport of jiu-jitsu, equalize basically, which went counter to everything the promoter had said because he said it was out of his control. To raise money, he said only the ADCC, I guess coming directly from the Sheikh or the Sheikh’s guys, could raise the prize money, he got it raised. And then what happened was, once we started getting some of these big names here, so some of the best guys from ADCC would be in this division. We’ve got a bunch of champions or medalists or, really, the top betting favorites for their divisions there, they started, and again, I can’t emphasize this enough, allegedly, paying show money which has never historically been done before to keep athletes in their show. So, you’re saying, allegedly, there were some under the table payments by ADCC? Do you have secret documents proving this?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.