Benson Henderson discusses new sponsorship landscape

Former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson tested free agency in MMA, and ended up signing with Bellator MMA. At the time, he cited the Reebok Deal as a major factor in leaving the UFC.

That made a huge, huge impact on the deal,” said Henderson at the time to Ryan Gerbosi for Newsday. “For me, I’m one of the fighters who lost out on a lot of money, a lot of money, when the rumors of the Reebok deal came out, and when it went into effect, I lost out on a lot of money. Being told I have to wear this, then being compensated with a few pennies, I’m not a big fan of. … I was in the top tier, you can look it up in public records, the top tier for the Reebok deal is $20,000, so if I were to fight four times in a year at $20,000 is $80,000 in sponsorship money. So for a whole year I get 80K for wearing Reebok and that would’ve been over $100,000 I would’ve lost in that one year from the Reebok deal.

You don’t have to be great at math to calculate that Henderson was making nearly $200,000 per year in sponsorships in the UFC, prior to Reebook becoming the exclusive apparel of the league.

Henderson’s first fight in Bellator was a welterweight title shot at champion Andrey Koreshkov, with the champ retaining his belt via unanimous decision. Henderson was not quite able to equal his Reebok money, but in a recent appearance on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, the fighter remained positive.

It is not clear who his sponsor was in his Bellator debut. The prominent spot on his shorts was taken by the gym he fights out of, John Crouch’s MMA Lab. Gyms generally get a small percentage of the purse, rather than pay out revenue.

“For my last Bellator fight, I had one sponsor, and with that one sponsor, just one, I made just shy of what I made for the Reebok sponsorship,” said Henderson, as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMA Fighting. said Monday on The MMA Hour. “But I am aware, I do know, that it’s going to take a while to build up those sponsors again. Sponsors in the UFC were at one point a very high dollar amount. You got paid quite a bit of money. After the Reebok thing took over, and all of the companies kind of heard about that, the value went down a lot.

“I’ll have to build back up to that, and I’m a patient man. I know my worth. I’m not going to sell myself short. If the Ritz Carlton has 100 rooms, and then 75 of the rooms are empty, do they rent out the rooms for any cheaper? Do they rent out the rooms for only $100 instead of that $700-$800 range that they normally rent out the rooms for one night? No. They know what the value of those rooms are. They know what their worth is. They hold to their worth, $700-$800 a night. I’m not going to sell myself short, I know what my value is.”

“Some sponsors are still wary of dropping the same amount of money they were dropping before, and that’s my job to convince them that I am worth it. Like, ‘no, I understand you guys are hesitant about sponsoring an athlete for this much money, but when you see the numbers, when you see freaking Spike TV pulling a 1.1 million peak rating, and there was [an NBA] playoff game that night — a playoff game that went into overtime, I think it was the Thunder versus the Warriors, so that game definitely hit my target audience, males 18 to whatever the age is, that kind of hurt us on the viewership — but when they start seeing viewership, they start seeing the Neilson Ratings, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, then they start changing their mind a little bit.

“So it’s my job to prove that I am worth it. I am worth this number, I am worth that number. But it’s a process. It’s not going to be easy, but I never was looking for the easy way out either.”

Henderson also discussed the possibility of a players association or union. The latest effort, by a noted baseball manager, appears intent on unionizing the UFC, but makes no reference to Bellator.

“I have talked to Mark Hunt’s people,” said Henderson. “I have talked to Cung Le and Jon Fitch’s people. Both want the same idea, the same thing: a fighters union, a fighters association. Looking at different models to follow, whether it’s the tennis model or the international football model, soccer model, whether it’s the basketball model — we are an individual sport so we can’t exactly follow the NFL model, we can’t exactly follow the NBA model. But because we are an individual sport, it won’t necessarily be just a UFC fighters association, it won’t just a Bellator fighters association. It will be a fighter association, fighters union, of all fighters everywhere.

“Anybody trying to separate the fighters, they’re doing it for a reason. They’re trying to separate to make our voice smaller, to make our pull, our demands smaller. So it would be very bad and detrimental to the fighters to separate at all. We need to stay strong. We need to stay smart about it. We need to hire smart people to work for us. We’ve got to hire smart lawyers and intelligent people who will help guide us in the formation of this fighters association.”

Henderson is turning 33 years old in November and has long indicated that he wants to retire from the fight game early, so the while the goal of getting a fighters association established may not be competed by the time he hangs up his gloves, he is more confident than ever that an association is an inevitability, rather than a pipe dream.

“I know a lot of guys have already been working on it for a couple years now,” Henderson said. “I’m still looking to retire in not too long, so I’m not sure if it’ll get done in my time period. But definitely if not while I’m fighting, I would say (it’ll get done) probably a couple years after that.”

Henderson’s next fight is at lightweight, vs. former featherweight champion Patricio Freire at Bellator 160 on August 26, 2016 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California.