Demetrious Johnson was one of many UFC’s most dominant athletes when the promotion was nonetheless discovering its footing on the planet of social media.
‘Mighty Mouse’ is taken into account by many to be one of many P4P best fighters within the sport’s historical past, scoring 11 consecutive title defenses — a UFC file that will very effectively stand the take a look at of time. However regardless of all of his accolades, Johnson by no means introduced house the paychecks like that of different champions throughout his legendary run.
The truth is, Johnson’s reign over the flyweight division was so important that the promotion has even thought-about shutting it down altogether.
Thankfully, that didn’t occur, however Demetrious Johnson has since discovered a brand new house in ONE Championship. There, he reigns because the promotion’s present flyweight MMA titleholder and accomplished the primary trilogy of his profession, successful back-to-back bouts in opposition to former champion Adriano Moraes.
Trying again on his time with the UFC, Johnson spoke concerning the promotion’s early days on social media and pushing athletes to develop their particular person manufacturers on-line with a collection of incentives.
“When Twitter, Instagram, and Fb first got here out, the UFC would deliver us to the ‘Fighter Summit’ and say, ‘You guys must construct your model. It’s free. It prices you nothing. The extra individuals wish to see you struggle, the extra money you’re going to make since you’re going to become profitable in pay-per-view factors, and so forth., and so forth., should you develop into a champion, should you develop into a associate,’” Johnson stated on his YouTube channel.
“The UFC was superb about doing that. Again then they’d ship you laptops. Again then they’d provide you with incentives, I feel it was like quarterly. Whoever had probably the most site visitors of their factor. First particular person would get $25,000. It might go like $12,000 then $5,000, perhaps $1,000. They’d give us a variety of incentives to speak concerning the fights and boast it, they usually stored on doing it for I feel a 12 months or two. Quick ahead to what it’s at present, I feel they’ve seen the payoff of them slowly investing in telling the fighters to do this” (h/t MMA Preventing).
Demetrious Johnson recollects how exhausting the UFC wished to push Cain Velasquez
The UFC held Fighter Summits between 2009 and 2011, proper across the time that Cain Velasquez rose to prominence and captured the heavyweight title with a surprising first-round knockout of Brock Lesnar at UFC 121.
“I’ll always remember on the UFC Fighter Summit they pulled an image of Cain Velasquez and have been like, ‘You see this man? This man is Mexican-American. We try to interrupt into the Mexican market so we would like this man to do very, very effectively. That you must observe this man’s footsteps and attempt to get your neighborhood behind you. That means, it brings extra eyeballs to the game,’” Johnson stated.
“I at all times inform my mates and my spouse, any verify I can get with out getting punched within the face is an efficient verify. It’s an excellent verify as a result of I’m getting paid for not me being within the gymnasium, coaching exhausting, and preventing, however by me being a private persona and going to shake some fingers, doing no matter it could be.”
