LOS ANGELES — Nate Diaz was done.
Throughout an abbreviated final stop on a four-city press junket promoting their crossover pay-per-view boxing match June 1 at The Forum in Inglewood, invectives flew and fans feigned like they were eager to scale a barrier separating them from Diaz, the 37-year-old combat sports star from Stockton, and fellow UFC fan favorite Jorge Masvidal, who delighted in egging them on.
“I expect more heat,” Masvidal said between invitations to step outside. “In my city, he couldn’t get a word out.”
Diaz wouldn’t claim L.A. as his city.
The Stockton native is a Giants-Niners-Kings-and-Warriors kind of guy, but they all play in California and, from a home-field advantage perspective, that played out like you might expect. Nonetheless, he was over the whole thing.
Diaz lasted 11 minutes before walking off the stage Friday night inside The Novo at L.A. Live, closing a weeklong promotional tour for the fists-only rematch of the first UFC BMF title fight in 2019 that sold out Madison Square Garden.
“It was a fun tour,” Diaz said, buttering up his departure. “Going all over the USA. I’m done with all this (crap). I’m cool with all this talking (crap).
“Sell this (crap) yourself, (expletive).”
A short time later in a room full of people he liked, Diaz summed up the experience:
“Obnoxious,” he said. “Obnoxious.”
Diaz had had enough of Masvidal: “I don’t like him. Does anyone else like him?”
Masvidal felt similarly: “As this tour has gone more and more and this last stunt he pulled, yeah, I’m starting to actually dislike this (expletive). I really want to put his lights out in a violent way.”
A doctor’s stoppage for cuts above and below Diaz’s right eye courtesy of Masvidal’s elbows inside the Octagon was a point of controversy among the fan base when it happened.
Even though the cuts required 25 stitches to close, that sense of unfinished business is among the reasons Fanmio, a digital platform that is increasingly producing combat sports pay-per-view events, footed the bill to put Diaz and Masvidal together in Las Vegas a day before UFC 300, New York, the Cuban-American’s home base of Miami and, lastly, the host city, which turned out a hefty pro-Diaz crowd.
“We believe if we do it, do it right,” said Solomon Engel, CEO and majority owner of Fanmio. “Don’t cut corners. That’s how it needs to be done. So why are we going to put in a ton of time, team resources, money behind something that really doesn’t have much of a return? That’s sort of the psychology we had. If we’re going to do an event, we’re trying to fit the right parties together. It all has to make sense.”
Counterintuitive as Diaz seems, by short-circuiting the streamed portion of the L.A. presser he likely did more to promote the event than by keeping to the confines of how the game is usually played. On top of his skill and determination as a fighter, both in the UFC and where he stands today as a free agent calling his own shots, it was the kind of viral example he’s paid millions to deliver for being himself.
The effect of combining forces, reputations and fan bases with Masvidal was weighed and measured by Engel’s data model, which he believes can accurately determine how an event could perform.
“We have a really detailed model, and it’s not just some fluff model,” Engel said. “It’s pretty detailed. Even running this show, running through this process, we’re comparing it up against the model and we’re like wow, in some areas we’re super close, which is good.”
Because Fanmio operates like a network and not just a promoter, Engel says that distributing its own events “gives us margins that traditional promoters don’t just have.”
Prior to the start of the pandemic, negotiating with some of combat sports’ most robust personalities for big-money purses wasn’t in Engel’s job description. His Miami-based company sold video chat meet-and-greets for fans and celebrities. It was good money, but not successful pay-per-view money, which came into focus after that lucrative ability was built as a separate feature when they introduced the production and distribution of content to the platform.
“When we leaned into that, focusing on that, the next thing you know we’re doing [Floyd] Mayweather-Logan Paul,” said Engel, who claimed the June 2021 exhibition did “incredibly well” at the box office, better than has been reported publicly.
“We realized, well, we make a lot more money doing combat sports and doing PPV than these little meet-and-greet business things,” he said, “so we shelved that business.”
The price point for Mayweather-Paul was $49.99 at a time when influencer boxing was taking hold.
Engel tried to match Diaz with Paul, but at the late stages of the negotiations, the UFC veteran agreed to instead fight the younger brother, Jake, for $59.99 on DAZN.
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Diaz vs. Masvidal is listed at $79.99 and occurs opposite UFC 302, which costs the same, making it a dilemma-inducing and expensive night for fight fans.
Engel booked his event first and explained that the UFC, which signed off on Masvidal’s participation, gave him the go-ahead to run June 1. When it became clear that the PPV events were actually running on parallel tracks, it was too late to hop off the train.
Diaz said fans should spend their money how they want. Masvidal made the case that if he was at home he’d purchase both events because that’s what combat sports addicts do.