77 days ago, EliteXC closed shop after CBS pulled out of a deal to buy the company. Within a week numerous fighters were talking about where they’d fight in the future, but over two months later they are still in limbo with no end in sight.
There have been numerous reports of a sale of Pro Elite, but it’s been a while since we heard anything about the deal. Pro Elite is a public company, it would be nearly impossible to keep the closing of a deal a secret. Of course, when troubled companies try to sell, the deals often fall apart at the last minute as a result of due diligence and company representations. It would not surprise me if that happened here. Pro Elite is saddled with numerous public debts that nobody wants to take on, which is undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to a sale.
The real victims here, as usual, are the fighters. They have now gone almost 3 months without the promise of any income, and the UFC won’t touch them because of their uncertain contractual status. There are a lot of villains in this situation, but fighter management has been shown yet again to be almost completely useless. It’s hard to imagine agents in any other field letting this happen to their clients. Monte Cox, Ken Pavia, and whoever else manages these fighters need to come together and file a joint action for declaratory relief in California. It will force Pro Elite to either put up or shut up about their future as a company instead of stringing these fighters along with false promises in order to maintain their only valuable asset for a potential sale.
In the best case scenario, Pro Elite’s management is striving to complete deals and the fighters just need to wait a little bit to be rewarded with more CBS exposure. In the worst case scenario, Pro Elite is stringing along fighters with false promises of sales while it attempts to find ways to drop debt and restructure to free itself of any long term obligations. Given this company’s short history, I find the latter more plausible, but hope the former is the case.