JL: You mentioned Spike. That’s the third network Bellator’s been on since you’ve been with the company. What’s it like being on Spike now compared to being on Fox Sports Net all those years ago? How different is it now?
SW: When we were on Fox Sports Net, I never really felt like we were on Fox Sports Net. I had been at Fox Soccer Channel, so I had been a contract employee of Fox International and in the culture of Fox a little bit. On Fox Sports Net, in the full year of 22 or 24 shows, I never saw a single Fox person. What I came to realize is that as much as I like Fox Sports Net, it’s really a confederation of regional sports networks. It’s not a true network in the sense of big national programming. Obviously, they have success with national programming and they’ll go big with their college football, but really, the base draw of Fox Sports Net is their regional programming.
So when we were at Bellator, the frustration was because we were being preempted. I live in Kansas City, and I know that on Fox Sports Midwest that first season, they took us live something like four times in those 22 or 24 shows. We were getting preempted by a Royals replay at three in the morning. It was very, very disappointing.
Moving over to Viacom and Spike was amazing. We’re their marquee sports property. My boss, Spike president Kevin Kay, was a writer for David Letterman. How much cooler does it get than that? When I see him, we’ll hang out together, have casual conversations because we’re both pop culture junkies, we’ll e-mail each other back and forth about what shows we’re watching like Mad Men and True Detective. It is the coolest work environment, and the fact that they encourage Jimmy Smith and myself to have fun. I usually have a couple days of stubble on my face when I’m TV, my hair is always kind of sticking up, I don’t tuck in my shirt. It’s just the coolest possible work environment for someone that’s a sports commentator that’s never quite fit the mold of being whatever it is that’s the mold of a stereotypical sports commentator.
JL: In recent years, Bellator has become more and more established on the mainstream scene. What do you think the first step towards Bellator becoming a legitimate rival to the UFC was?
SW: I think that would be Spike. No question about it. People were leery of what Bellator was going to be. It was almost as though people didn’t want to fall in love with Bellator because they were going to get burned. And as a hardcore, I understand that, because PRIDE ruled the world. People forget that ten years ago, PRIDE was a lot bigger than the UFC certainly globally, and arguably in the US and Canada. You had Calvin Ayers with BodogFight, and they were going to take over the world. Jay Larkin left Showtime to get involved in the IFL, and they had a business model and a national TV deal, and they couldn’t get established. Affliction, and I worked both of their shows, doing the international broadcast on the first and the pay-per-view on the second, all of that t-shirt money, and they lasted two shows. When I was with M-1, we were in something like 80 or 90 countries and on HDNet in Key West. They thought they were going to make a run. Fedor Emelianenko, who I thought was the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world at the time, was involved in the ownership and management.
You had all of these failed promotions, and I really feel like people were leery about getting burned by Bellator. It reminded me of when I was an MLS commentator. I was with MLS literally from day one, year one, April 1996, and the first three-four years at MLS, the question was “how is it going to come back?” Obviously you never hear that about MLS now, but that wasn’t the case in the ‘90s. And I kind of feel like that was around Bellator, not internally because we never felt like we were going out of business, but externally with fans. They’d be like “wow, I don’t want to like Bellator too much” and feel like we were another Affliction, or IFL, or Elite XC and just go away. People just didn’t want to fall in love with us.
When we went to Spike, that was the real deal. We’re on Spike, we’re on the established MMA network, we have a lot of promotion behind us. Viacom’s our majority owner, and we’re not going anywhere. To me, that was the turning point, because fans can now really start to like Bellator and not worry that we weren’t going to be showing up on their TV screens in a few months.
JL: Heading into the first pay-per-view in the promotion’s history, do you think leading into the show you’re personally going to do anything differently?
SW: No, I’m not. It’s funny, the way I approach things. On every Bellator, we either do a two or a two and a half hour prelim show on Spike.com, and I put in the same amount of prep time, spend the same amount of time with my fighter interviews face to face, the same amount of research on the first prelim, no matter if you’re 2-2 or 2-1, as I do the main event and our world title fights.
The only thing I really have to figure out are my bathroom breaks. I drink an obscene amount of Diet Mountain Dew, and I always have to time my commercial breaks, so I’m trying to figure that out. Also, I hosted the MLS Draft for three years when we went six or seven hours without a commercial break or a bathroom break, but that really is my only consideration.
For me, if one person is listening, I really have to try my hardest. It’s just kind of the way I was raised by my mom. I think some people in life are like a dimmer switch – they have various shades of on or off. I’ve always been a light switch in my personal life or my broadcast life, I’m either on or I’m off, and if I’m going to do it, I’m going to be 100%. So whether we’re on pay-per-view or we’re on Fox Sports Net or when I was doing those M-1 shows and we were on HDNet, it makes no difference to me.
Obviously, I’m excited for the scope and the magnitude of how big the fights are, but I’m preparing the same as a regular week. It’s exactly the same order of business for me.
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