Long before mixed martial arts filled arenas and paid its champions eight figures, the sport’s earliest stars were figuring out their worth in real time. According to Erik Paulson, one of the pioneers of the sport and founder of Combat Submission Wrestling, Rickson Gracie‘s pay demands from Japan’s PRIDE FC escalated dramatically once it became clear he could dominate the competition.
Paulson, who trained directly with the Gracie family in the late 1980s and helped broker Rickson’s entry into Japanese competition, described sitting in on the negotiations himself. He recalled a meeting at a Cheesecake Factory with Rickson and others, where the terms of the athlete’s compensation were laid out.
“I got to sit in and listen to how he was going to fig ht in this tournament,” Paulson said during the interview. “And if he won, then his money would double. He said, I’ll take 50 grand to fig ht and 50 to win. And then he goes, when I win, the next fig ht I’ll take a hundred and a hundred. And then after he won the second tournament, he said, I’ll take a million and a million.”
The numbers kept climbing as Rickson kept winning.
“Shooto, I don’t think Shooto had a million and a million to offer,” Paulson said, referring to the Shooto organization. “Like PRIDE, PRIDE had something. So then he started figh ting and then he’s like, I’ll take 2 million and 2 million. So he got paid a ton of money to fig ht.”
Paulson said he was the one who first connected the Gracie camp with Japanese promoters, inviting Rickson to compete in Shooto on three separate occasions before he finally agreed.
“They ultimately wanted Rickson because he was supposed to be the best Gracie, the toughest,” Paulson explained.
Once Rickson entered the Japanese scene and began winning, promoters recognized that his drawing power, and his family’s mission of proving jiu-jitsu’s dominance, gave him enormous leverage at the negotiating table.
That mission, Paulson noted, was the whole point of the endeavor from the start.
“That was the whole purpose that was devised by Rorion, was to expose the weakness of all the other systems and how dominant the Gracie jiu-jitsu system was for overall MMA figh ting,” he said.
