You could call it Tom’s Tuesday Toronto Tussle.
Tom Wright, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) director of operations in Canada, is a firm believer in knowing how the product he sells works. The 58-year-old is a mixed martial arts novice.
“We found an MMA gym in Toronto where we go every Tuesday to learn the sport, to learn the techniques, to learn the difference between a guillotine choke and a rear-naked choke,” said Wright during a Vancouver visit to hype the June 11 UFC 131 show at Rogers Arena.
Wright was a college rugby player who became an Adidas and Salomon marketing executive. He is best known as the Canadian Football League commissioner who brought the league back to viability and respectability from 2002 to 2007. He joined UFC in late May 2010, less than two weeks before the controversial spectacle’s debut in Vancouver.
By April 30, UFC will have staged its 129th and largest event anywhere by grossing $11 million in ticket sales from 55,000 spectators at Toronto’s Rogers Centre. The upcoming Vancouver show will be headlined by Brock Lesnar and Junior dos Santos, the coaches on UFC’s Ultimate Fighter TV series. Therefore, it will easily surpass the 520,000 buy rate for last year’s UFC 115 that featured a Chuck Liddell/Rich Franklin headliner.
Wright’s plan for Canadian expansion includes events in smaller markets, like Edmonton, Regina and Winnipeg, and events under the Strikeforce brand; UFC bought the rival circuit in March.
Wright plans to meet with B.C. government officials to add his voice to the chorus seeking a provincewide athletic commission. The municipal patchwork, he says, just doesn’t work.
“We, as an organization, we run to regulation, we want it and we seek it out,” Wright said. “It’s all about making sure there’s a level playing field for athletes, that they’re treated properly, health and safety is first and foremost, referees are properly trained and there’s drug testing.”
Meanwhile, UFC continues to grow.
It’ll be in Argentina this summer. A Beijing office means an event could be in China in the next two years. India is on the horizon.
“Hopefully by the end of this year our content will be in more than a billion homes – that’s not bad for a 10-year-old company,” Wright said. “UFC will never be as strong as the NFL is in the U.S., and the UFC will never be as strong as the NHL in Canada. MMA is a global sport and American football isn’t and hockey isn’t. We’ve got that as an advantage.”
The legacy of Vancouver 2010 is alive and well in London.
Much of VANOC’s $44.9 million commercial rights management spending was focused on an International Olympic Committee-required, blanket, out-of-home advertising buy for Sea-to-Sky, Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. The London 2012 organizing committee (LOCOG) wants to avoid VANOC’s recession-caused unsold inventory, so it launched an online auction April 4 to dispose of 250 million pounds worth of advertising around the next Olympic city.
Meanwhile, the British Olympic Association (BOA) doesn’t want to end up like the Canadian Olympic Committee, which realized no direct profit from Vancouver 2010. BOA’s deal with LOCOG calls for a 20% share of any profits from the 2012 Games. But LOCOG insists that both the Olympics and heavily subsidized Paralympics be counted.
twitter.com/bobmackin