Interview with Guy Mezger

After an illustrious and decorated career in professional fighting (during which he was both the UFC 13 lightweight tournament champion and the 7th King of Pancrase), Guy Mezger is now the president of Mark Cuban's HDNet Fights, one of the foremost promotion companies in mixed martial arts today. I got the chance to sit down with the native Dallasite at his gym, Guy Mezger's Combat Sports Club in Addison, to discuss the state of mixed martial arts, the sport's future and the quality of Jean Claude Van Damme films

Crisp: First of all, I’d like to thank you for sitting down and talking to me today. How are you doing?

Mezger: I’m doing well, thank you.

SC: You’ve watched the fight game grow from the ground up, you fought in UFC 4 when it was a bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred tournament. I would just like to get your thoughts on where you see the fight game going in the next 10 years.

GM: To be honest, that’s a pretty loaded question. The reason being is that there has been huge growth in the sport due to the fact that we have unbelievable access to information and the ability to get information out there through websites and internet and stuff because that’s what really kept mixed martial arts alive when it couldn’t really be seen on T.V. Since basically the inception in 1993 to today, we’ve created what first started out as a spectacle, with no rules that was sooner or later going to get clamped down on, and watch it grow nationally into a legitimate sport. That’s what we enjoy, creating a new athlete. You know, before there was a karate athlete or a boxing athlete but now, in a very short amount of time, we’ve created a mixed martial arts athlete, someone who actually trains as a mixed martial arts athlete, which is new. What will stagnate the growth of it is the fact that there’s only one major player right now in America and that’s the UFC. They’re the 600 pound gorilla and there are some other good organizations out there but not quite at their level. If that stays that way, it will kill the sport, because you can’t have a monopoly.

SC: You’re the president of Mark Cuban’s HDNet Fights. What sets this company apart from other promotions in the MMA world?

GM: HDNet fights brings to the table a completely vertically integrated system to where we can march in to help any promoter to do what they want to do. Originally we were thinking about doing our own promotions and we still do, but we’re looking to put on big shows. We would like to get away from the idea of organizations. Technically, you shouldn’t be able to control the fighters, the production, the promotion of the event and the sanctioning body and that makes it tough. The thing that HDNet fights brings is our ability to get promoters that want to have successful events and want to take it to the next level, we can come in and get you on TV in front of eleven million subscribers. Well, it was eleven million six months ago, and next year we’ll be passing up Showtime in the number of subscribers we have. We put on two live events a month, minimum, we’ll have thirty this year and it’s basically free.

SC: How do you feel about the UFC’s role in bringing the sport to the level it’s at today as opposed to the common notion that the company is monopolizing the mixed martial arts business?

GM: The UFC did a very good job of pulling this sport out of obscurity. Is it, in my mind, detrimental to have a monopoly? Absolutely. The problem with a lot of the business models in mixed martial arts is they think, ‘we’re going to put UFC out of business and we’re going to crush these guys’—That’s not a business model. That’s a road to destruction for yourself. We have to look at it as, ‘Hey, if there’s an American Airlines, there’s also a British Airways and there’s a Continental and there’s a Southwest Airlines and there are great regional airlines.’ They all can coexist. In fact they all need each other at times. So if UFC represents American Airlines, we want to put the next Continental out there or the next Delta, so there’s some good, healthy competition. That will make for the growth of the sport. There are a lot of great athletes out there who aren’t getting opportunities because there’s such a small amount of space. Having more competition, having more organizations, having more weight classes; it doesn’t water it down, it gives more opportunities.

SC: Competition breeds greatness, right?

GM: Absolutely. Nobody’s born great. Except for maybe (former UFC and Pride fighter) Tra Telligman. (Tra Walks in the room)

SC: I’ve heard legend of the old Lion’s Den tryout. Could you tell me a little more about what that was like?

GM: It was basically the same tryout they had for the Pancrase organization in Japan. Ken (Shamrock) went through it when he first got over there to do shoot style wrestling and he brought it over when he came over and started doing his own thing. It was pretty straight forward; you had to do 500 squats, 500 sit ups, 500 leg lifts, 200 push ups, you had to run for a mile and a half, and then you fought. Most guys didn’t make it out of the squats.

SC: Pat Miletich is making a comeback this Thursday on HDNet Fights. Have you ever thought of coming back and fighting?

GM: I think about it all the time, but not hard enough to do it. It would be a two-fight deal if I was to come back—The first fight would be with my wife and if I got past her, which I don’t think would happen, I’d probably do another fight. What a lot of people don’t understand is that I’ve had a long career. I had a total of 145 pro fights—That’s not amateur fights or wrestling matches or judo matches or anything, so that was a lot of wear and tear on my body. I was blessed to get out as healthy as I did. Every now and then I get the bug, but it’s time for other people. I had my day in the sun, I enjoyed it, I had a completely blessed career, and all that is wonderful. But to push it too much, instead of something being blessed, it becomes a loadstone around your neck, and I don’t want that. I want my memories to be fond of the fight business.