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New HQ represents turning point for UFC, athletes

The UFC’s 184,000-square-foot headquarters and performance institute will bring all 250-plus employees under one roof.
Photo by: KGA ARCHITECTURE / ZUFFA LLC
On his first tour of the UFC’s soon-to-open 184,000-square-foot headquarters, No. 1 ranked flyweight Joe Benavidez perked up as retired light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin described the eight cameras that will surround the building’s competition-sized training octagon, allowing fighters to capture an array of angles from a sparring session, then play any of them back on an 80-inch video board.

“No way,” Benavidez said, struck by the mind-bending advance for a sport in which many fighters use an iPhone to record their sparring sessions.

The UFC’s new headquarters will represent a vast change for both the company and its athletes.

No longer will its 250 employees be spread across five buildings of an office park that they steadily have outgrown over the last decade. And, for the first time, the 550 fighters under contract with the promoter will have year-round access to a $14 million, 30,000-square-foot training complex similar to those enjoyed by athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, as well as in most major college programs, staffed by strength and conditioning coaches, trainers, nutritionists and physical therapists.

The latter could represent a sweeping cultural change for a sport in which fighters who operate as independent contractors typically come together to train in clusters of 10 to 50, each of them responsible for the overhead of their training costs, including fees collected by gyms, coaches and sparring partners.

Fighters and their coaches can schedule space in the second-floor gym with 15 heavy bags that can slide away to create more space.
Photo by: KGA ARCHITECTURE / ZUFFA LLC
The UFC will offer its fighters access to the facility and staff at no cost, other than travel and lodging, driven by the theory that reductions in injuries and improved performance will benefit not only the athletes, but also the business, attracting and retaining the most marketable fighters and keeping them in the octagon as scheduled.

“Most buildings like this are built for a team, where everybody who is in there is on the same team,” said Griffin, who as the UFC’s vice president of athlete development manages the relationships between the company and its fighters. “We have 500 different guys from 500 different teams. Team ‘me.’ So it’s going to mean thinking a little differently.

“But this is how you make your living. If somebody is offering to give you high-quality services for free to make you better at your job, you’d take it, right?”

The facility is the merger of two ideas, one driven by necessity and the other by invention.

We’re not going to teach them how to throw a better knee from a clinch. I can’t. But I can teach you how to work out in the morning and then have a good workout in the evening and build a week of successful workouts.”
              

FORREST GRIFFIN 
Vice president of athlete development, UFC

Photo by:
ZUFFA LLC
Through 15 years of growth, often in compressed spurts, the UFC staff blew through office space the way a child goes through shoes. It was inevitable that it would need a larger home.

But the shape that home would take changed radically in 2015, when UFC management took stock of a cataclysmically poor year of pay-per-view, which remains a key profit center even as the sport has evolved into a more broadly distributed TV property.

The UFC saw cancellations or significant alterations to the main event in eight of its 13 pay-per-view events, typically because of injuries sustained during training. In one case, a bout was scrapped when a fighter had to be hospitalized for dehydration while trying to cut weight. Among the fighters beset by injuries were several of the UFC’s bigger stars: Jon “Bones” Jones, Chris Weidman, Cain Velasquez and Rashad Evans.

Already dealing with the retirement of some of its better-selling fighters, the UFC saw sales drop to about 265,000 buys per event, or about half of what it generated per show during its peak years of 2008-10.

“We sort of went back and said, ‘What happened here?’” said UFC Chief Operating Officer Lawrence Epstein. “We looked at all our decisions. We thought our TV deal was good. Our marketing was good. All the decisions we had control of, we made good calls. But what was negatively affecting our decisions was things outside of our control. In response to that we said, if things that are outside our control are causing us problems, we need to get more involved in those types of situations.

UFC-employed strength and conditioning coaches, physical therapists and nutritionists will staff the training and rehabilitation area.
Photo by: KGA ARCHITECTURE / ZUFFA LLC
“That was the genesis of the performance institute.”

The more that UFC executives heard about the details of fighter injuries, the more convinced they became that they could have been avoided. The culture of many MMA training camps is to bring together fighters from varied disciplines and weight classes, who end up sparring out of either necessity, unchecked ego or the misfortune of a random draw.

When Jones tore the meniscus in his knee and sprained his ankle in preparation for a fight in 2014, it was while training with Alistair Overeem, a powerful kick boxer who at 6-foot-4 is the same height as Jones, but 40 pounds heavier. Even more frustrating, Jones’ upcoming opponent was Daniel Cormier, a 5-foot-11 wrestler.

“Some of these guys are still training like cavemen,” said UFC President Dana White, whose first exposure to the sport came nearly 20 years ago as a fight manager. “That’s why people are getting injured. And when people get injured, it hurts the company. But we’re very good and have deep rosters. We save the show. But that athlete doesn’t get paid. He trained and spent money and he doesn’t get paid. We’re trying to eliminate that.

“For these guys to be able to show up at this performance center and get the kind of individualized personal attention and training from the best in the world when it comes to evaluations, nutrition, strength and conditioning and rehab and all that stuff — it’s an absolute game changer.”

The 17,000-square-foot second floor will feature a gym with competition-sized octagon, as well as a lounge with couches and nap pods where athletes can relax.
Photo by: KGA ARCHITECTURE / ZUFFA LLC
Fighters and UFC employees will share a common dining area. Meals provided will fit the training diets of the athletes.
Photo by: KGA ARCHITECTURE / ZUFFA LLC
The first floor of the athlete performance side of the building is devoted to training and rehabilitation, 13,000 square feet stocked with state-of-the-art equipment, staffed by UFC-employed strength and conditioning coaches, physical therapists and nutritionists. The 17,000-square-foot second floor is for MMA-specific training, with no staffing by the UFC, allowing fighters to schedule the space for use with their own martial arts and boxing coaches.

Athletes and UFC employees will share a common dining area that will prepare meals that fit the training diets that nutritionists recommend for the fighters.

Like its pro sports counterparts, the UFC expects to secure a naming-rights sponsor for the facility, likely from a health care provider, the sector that most commonly aligns with training complexes.

“A lot of people think this is just going to be perceived as an expense part of the business,” Epstein said. “Actually, we think the opposite. We think this is an entrepreneurial opportunity for us to make our business run more efficiently. You’ll see sponsorship opportunities coming down the road with some really big partners. We’re going to start seeing more of that, which will help mitigate the cost. But the way we get a return on this thing is not through selling sponsorships. It’s by preventing injuries from taking place and preventing athletes from missing fights due to excessive and improper weight cuts. And we’re helping our athletes train safer.

“If we save a few of the right fights, this thing has paid for itself.”

Rapid growth

White snickered through the corner of a grin when asked about his first UFC office, shaking his head as he contemplated the company’s hardscrabble start.

Though located in the same building the UFC occupies today, in an office park near the Fertitta family’s Palace Station Hotel & Casino, White’s space wasn’t an office so much as a storage room, used mostly as a graveyard for outdated computers. The Fertittas were in the midst of a real estate binge, so maps and blueprints tended to land there, for lack of a formal home. His desk was a small wooden table, with a phone. For almost two years, his only employee was an assistant who worked with him in his previous life as a fight manager and trainer.

Turnkey Sports Poll

The following are results of the Turnkey Sports Poll taken in March. The survey covered more than 2,000 senior-level sports industry executives spanning professional and college sports.

Compared to two years ago, UFC today is … 

Less popular 41%
As popular 33%
More popular 19%
Not sure / No response 7%

To grow its brand, UFC should …

Dial back the ferocity 26%
Amp up the ferocity 23%
Not sure / No response 51%

Which sport or league would benefit more from a potential Mayweather-McGregor fight?

Boxing 47%
UFC 39%
Not sure / No response 14%

Source: Turnkey Sports & Entertainment in conjunction with SportsBusiness Journal. Turnkey Intelligence specializes in research, measurement and lead generation for brands and properties. Visit www.turnkeyse.com.

From that outpost, White and the Fertitta brothers built a framework that would transform the UFC from a hemorrhaging, fly-by-night, outlaw fight circuit into a profitable venture that they would sell for $4 billion.

Rapid growth of the business led to steady growth of staff, from two employees for the first two years to about 50 after five years, more than 100 after 10 years and about 250 today, almost all of them in Las Vegas.

When the Fertittas sold a restaurant chain they operated, the UFC staff took over their offices on the first floor, shared with an insurance company that leased space. When the insurance firm left, the UFC knocked down the wall and took the whole floor. When that filled up, White moved back upstairs, next door to patriarch Frank Fertitta Jr. and the brain trust of the family’s investment firm.

It wasn’t long before the Fertittas bought the building, remodeled it, and turned the whole thing over to the UFC. When that was filled, they bought a second building in the office complex. Then a third. They leased about half of a fourth building and then part of a fifth.

This is how the UFC got to where it has been for the last few years, bursting at the seams of an office park next to an In-N-Out Burger.

The main building hosts most of senior management, communications, talent relations, strategy and facility management. Another holds production. A third, programming. The two leased buildings contain a patchwork of UFC departments. Finance, accounting, legal, regulatory and IT take up most of one building. Health and performance, human resources, consumer products, sponsorship and event operations occupy about half of another.

Walking from the parking lot to his office one afternoon last month, the UFC’s vice president of athlete health and performance, Jeff Novitzky, stopped next to an elevator to rave about the impact of the soon-to-open self-contained campus. Behind Novitzky was a salon that specializes in hair extensions.

“For the last 10 or 12 years, the company has been completely busted apart,” White said. “There are offices here that I’ve never been in. Most of these offices. There are people I’ve never even seen.

“Everybody is going to be together for the first time, and that’s exciting.”

“The way we get a return on this thing is not through selling sponsorships. It’s by preventing injuries from taking place and preventing athletes from missing fights due to excessive and improper weight cuts. And we’re helping our athletes train safer.”

LAWRENCE EPSTEIN
Chief Operating Officer, UFC

When Epstein joined the UFC full time as its general counsel in 2006, he left a successful commercial litigation practice. The company had about 60 employees and had emerged as an enterprise to be taken seriously.

“I got to my office and it was stacked with old computer monitors,” Epstein said. “I figured, they’ll get it out of here eventually. Two weeks later, they’re still there.”

The first time White came to Epstein’s office, the clutter stopped him midsentence.

“What the hell is going on with all these computer terminals?” White asked.

“I asked the IT guy and he said he’d get to it,” Epstein said.

White erupted, calling the IT head and demanding he remove the junked monitors immediately.

“That guy got fired,” White said.

“Shows you how we’ve gone from a small company that was operated organically to one that’s part of a major entertainment, media and sports conglomerate that has a lot more structure,” Epstein said. “If we’re going to take this to the next level, this is the type of structure that we need. We still need the creativity and entrepreneurship, but it’s nice to have the structure and resources and support behind it, too.”

The inspiration for many aspects of the facility came from what UFC executives saw while touring training facilities in other sports, Epstein said. The one that made the most impact was that of EPL soccer club Manchester City, which opened a sprawling $300 million facility in 2015.

“Their offices are built around the practice field, so every time someone in accounting or legal is walking around, they’re looking at the product,” said Epstein, pointing out a design style also common in NFL training complexes. “It will be the same philosophy here. We want to remind everybody, no matter what department you work in, that the athlete is the core of the product you’re working with every day.”

State-of-the-art training

The first floor of the athlete performance center is where the UFC hopes to chart a new, science-based course for MMA training.

The building will include two entrances: One for employees and guests and the other for athletes, each with a reception desk. When athletes check in, their typical first stop will be in the therapy and nutrition areas, for exams and biological testing.

There are rooms to meet with nutritionists and physical therapists, along with a 900-square-foot room with five tables for massages and therapy.

Next to the nutrition and therapy areas are the workout spaces, which include an indoor turf track for sled pulls and drags. A cardio area will include bikes, treadmills and rowers. The strength area includes resistance machines and weight-training equipment that measures whether athletes balance the workload between their right and left sides, an indicator of whether they’re injured or prone to an injury.

Video analysis equipment will provide biomechanical feedback on most activities.

“The idea is that you can’t improve what you haven’t objectively measured in the past,” said James Kimball, vice president of operations, who will oversee the UFC Performance Institute. “Everything we’re doing here from the moment the athletes walk through the door, we are objectively measuring. So we can set baselines for them so that as they return they can put those processes in place to improve.”

Prior to this UFC 189 fight, Conor McGregor (left) tore his ACL while sparring during training.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
One wall of the strength area includes four hangar doors that look out onto a covered outdoor training area that can be used for tire flips and other exercises that require more space than you’d find in a gym. Kimball predicts that the Vegas weather will allow them to keep the doors open about 70 percent of the year.

Recovery areas also are state of the art: A cryotherapy chamber that will be popular, along with hot and cold plunge pools, a HydroWorx pool with underwater treadmill, a laser light therapy unit and a low-oxygen chamber that allows injured athletes to get a cardio workout while putting less stress on joints and muscles.

“The piece that our mixed martial arts athletes haven’t gotten is how to integrate strength, conditioning, recovery and nutrition in with the other skills,” Griffin said. “This is the place to do that. They already have their experts. We’re not going to teach them how to throw a better knee from a clinch. I can’t. But I can teach you how to work out in the morning and then have a good workout in the evening and build a week of successful workouts.”

Upstairs is the area that looks more like the traditional MMA gym, with an octagon and a boxing ring, a large room with mats for grappling and 15 heavy bags that slide away to create space when not in use. There also are two StrikeMate pads that measure the power and pace of punches.

It’s all complemented by a lounge with couches, video game consoles and nap pods, so that an athlete with an hour or two between a workout session and another engagement doesn’t have to cool his heels in a hotel room.

The plan, UFC executives said, is not for the facility to replace existing training camps, but to enhance them. Every fighter on the roster cycles through Las Vegas each year, many of them two or three times, either for a bout, an appearance, or a fighter retreat. Griffin will suggest that fighters bring their coaches and training partners to Vegas for a week during training, working with the UFC-provided staff on strength and fitness and then breaking off on their own for sessions upstairs.

The facility also can provide a soft landing for recovery after bouts.

“We want to increase guys’ performance,” Epstein said. “We’re going to provide them with data to show them that they’re increasing performance without getting out there and punching each other or wrestling where they can hurt their knees.

“We watched Conor McGregor get his knee cranked by Rory MacDonald. There was just no reason for that to happen.”

Two summers ago, McGregor sustained what he said was an 80 percent tear of his ACL while sparring against MacDonald three months before headlining the UFC 189 pay-per-view, on which MacDonald also was featured.

In recent years, UFC executives frequently have scratched their heads when learning of the manner in which fighters have gotten hurt in training.

The disconnect goes back to some of the structure and traditions of MMA training. The top trainers and coaches work with dozens of fighters, bringing many of them into the gym at the same time for workouts and sparring sessions. Often, the matchups are dictated by who happens to be in the gym that day rather than the size or style of the fighter or his upcoming opponent.

Benavidez
Working out that way can be cost-efficient for an up-and-coming fighter making less than $20,000 for a preliminary bout. But that’s probably not a wise approach for the many fighters who have earned enough to pay a few sparring partners their own size to mimic an upcoming opponent.

“Once you’re established, why do the potluck with the other 50 guys who are on the mat?” Griffin asked. “That’s the way everybody starts. But once you’ve achieved some success and made a little money, you need to stop doing that and start setting it up for yourself.”

For his last fight, Benavidez paid four sparring partners. He worked out with other fighters, but only sparred with his partners.

“I’ve been on a full team, sharing a mat with 50 guys not knowing who I’m going to spar with the next round for the majority of my career,” said Benavidez, who developed his career through the Team Alpha Male camp with friend Urijah Faber. “But now I’m taking the approach that I’m going to invest in myself.

“Nobody is training in a world-class facility like this. We have people who are expected to be world-class athletes, but they’re training in their garage. And without the science behind it.

“I think this place could change things drastically.”

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