‘I am a big hater of…’ - UFC legend Frank Mir after watching Tim Sylvia slap fighting

Ex-UFC heavyweight titleholder, Tim Sylvia was out of action since 2013 after his third consecutive loss against Ruslan Magomedov. In 2015, he looked for a comeback but a pre-fight MRI scan derailed it completely. Recently, Sylvia made his debut in the highly controversial sport of slap fighting.

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However, he managed a KO win and claimed the Slap Fighting Championship heavyweight title. The UFC president Dana White is currently backing this new sport but seeing a former UFC fighter in it, former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir was sad. While talking to talkSPORT, Mir shared his disappointment and hatred for slap fighting.

“We are not going to become millionaires off the back of the fighters.” - Frank Mir

Mir said: “I am a big hater of slap fighting. In fact, if I’m ever going through anything social media and I see anything come up, I try to swipe through it as fast as possible, so the algorithm doesn’t read that I want to see as any of that garbage.”

“I think that is one of the things I want to fix about our sport. You know, when an NFL player goes broke three years after his career no one sits there and goes. ‘Well, the NFL didn’t pay him enough.’ No, they have a player’s union, he got paid, he got compensated, he just went out like an idiot and was having $100,000 parties,” Mir further added.

“When you see an MMA fighter who is struggling after his career, people don’t really say, ‘Oh, he didn’t manage his money well.’ It’s, ‘Well, they are not compensated for what they generate. If you look at some of the numbers we pull off on pay-per-views and how much the fighters get paid – that’s one of the things I want to fix about our industry. A much smaller portion goes to the promotion. We are not going to become millionaires off the back of the fighters. The show has to make money so we can continue to have a show but at the same time the fighters themselves are the most compensated,” Frank Mir concluded.