Cro Cop says he was the only guy that had the balls to fight a prime Bob Sapp

Bubblun said:
You are massively overestimating how much Fedor, Sergei and all those guys got paid by Pride when they started.

Pride on average paid better than the others orgs, but those guys weren't making millions and only certain fighters were making good money.

According to Enson Inoue

"I think I got $80,000 for the Kerr fight. They paid Sakuraba peanuts. Pride didn’t pay Sakuraba well because Takada was in charge of him. He was taking all the money. Pride would pay Takada Dojo. Sakuraba got a salary from Takada Dojo. … That’s why they ended up having a falling-out. They want nothing to do with each other now."

"I believe Pride was the type of association that could take what they could get. It wasn’t an association where they treated all the fighters fairly. I was treated very differently in Pride because I was needed. I was popular in Japan. They knew I didn’t need them. They played hardball with people that needed them. Igor Vovchanchyn made peanuts -- $10,000. They’d threaten Mark Kerr, go down to where Kerr was training and make sure he was ready. Pretty much bully him around."

Paying a guy like Igor Vovchanchyn 10k isn't exactly go after talent, they were exploiting guys, and i feel bad for Sakuraba, the guy gave his health for this sport.
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I'm going to call Enson questionable there personally, not that Pride didn't try to play hardball(they were certainkly no angels, it was more the environment that forced them to invest) when they could but Igor was I'm pretty sure earning a lot more than 10K.

Again though were not automatically talking giant payouts, there just talking about relatively good payouts straight away. I'm guessing Fedor wasn't earning giant amounts early on in RINGS but he was earning a heck of a lot more than he would have on some small Russian event. Maybe a younger hardup Fedor not given that early money desides to try and keep chasing state funding for his Judo career and never moves to MMA/Sambo.

The power of the supercamps like BTT, Chute, Boxe, RTT, etc in that era was I suspect that they had such a direct line to big orgs. They could basically say to new talent "train MMA full time and we can get you on the big show fast". Heck I would not be at all supprised if even JDS when he was making the choice to train MMA full time was told by the Nogs that they could get him into Pride relatively quickly.

As I keep saying the proof is in results isn't it? Pride, Rings and even the early UFC who would sign guys like Arlovski relatively quickly brought so much talent to the HW division in the early 00's, the UFC in a dominant position in recent years has introduced barely any new talent with potential to reach the top.

I mean the argument guys like Overeem, Werdum, Hunt, etc have "evolved" beyond the Pride era is one thing(not that I'd agree with it but still its worth of discussion) but I really don't think you can look past just how little new HW talent theres been in recent years.
 
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Fedor was making scraps before his manager renegotiated his deal and had him fight on a rival show NYE 2003. Before then Fedor was making much less than Nog and Cro Cop despite being the champion. Like, 30 to 40 grand a fight. From the GP onwards he was paid very well.

Fedor's old coach and manager at RTT was taking from his paychecks without telling him and that's what caused the fissure between Fedor/Alecks and Sergei and the rest of RTT. Fedor had a shittonne of managerial issues early in his career that he fortunately sorted out shortly after he hit his athletic stride. He's been making at a minimum, $1m per fight since about 2007/8 or so.
 
Cro Cop was paid very handsomely from the Sapp fight onwards. Upwards of six figures a fight. He knew he was a star, he was a diva, and he wasn't afraid to throw his weight around to leverage what he wanted from promoters.
 
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