FIGHTHPYE Article - 02.16.2009

We want the Fighters to get the Biggest Chunk of the Money!

GREG DELONG: “WE WANT THE FIGHTERS TO GET THE BIGGEST CHUNK OF THE MONEY!”
By Percy Crawford

“We want you to be able to get your favorite MMA fighter, but eventually, I would like to have it where you can get your favorite combat sports fighter. We’ve got a commitment from the manager, but we want K-1 fighters up there. I want to have some of the wrestlers that make the Olympics, so they could pick up some money, and boxers. Any full contact sports participant, we want to make these wall papers accessible to their fans,” stated Greg DeLong, WOW SportZ Wall Fighters Director of Marketing, as he talked about the vision of WOW SportZ and their Wall Fighters product. Check it out!

PC: How is everything going?

GD: Everything is going pretty good; just trying to make a buck.

PC: I always thought it would be a great idea for someone to get fighters on wallpapers similar to what Fathead does in other sports. What prompted Wow Sportz to do this?

GD: Here is how it is. Wow Sportz is the parent company and they do it for high school sports. I came on as a rep for them because I have kids that play soccer and I’m into big soccer clubs where I’m the referee. I talked to the owners and they tell me there is nobody doing this in mixed martial arts and I have my own mixed martial arts radio show here in Reno on Fox Sports Radio. I call up guys and stuff like that. My story: I wrestled in high school and college and some of the guys like Mark Coleman, who went to Ohio State, and I would beat up on Mark Kerr when I came back from college because my cousin was his high school wrestling coach. I’ve followed the sport from the beginning. They weren’t too familiar with MMA. They knew what it was and they went on some websites and checked into it and told me it was a great market to go after.

So I first started calling managers that I had relationships with or contacts with because of my radio show. I had been calling them getting fighters on my show. The very first day, I had to keep calling back to headquarters and saying, “Hey, you need to call this manager.” And then a couple of hours later, I was calling them back with managers to call. So after the first day, we were in a conference call and they put me in charge and we created the whole “Wall Fighters” vision. We came up with the contract and all of that so I could go ahead with the negotiations and not keep going back. That’s how we got it started and the web guy put the website together and now we’re getting it going and that’s how the whole thing came to fruition.

PC: What fighters do you guys currently have and when will the wallpapers become available?

GD: They’re available right now. Right now, there are 10 fighters up on the site and there are other fighters that we are working out the kinks with. We have 10 signed fighters and some fighters that we haven’t received the contracts back for. We only have 4 pictures up because the photo that is required is a higher quality than someone just saying, “Hey, we’ve got a picture of our fighter.” It’s got to be from head to toe and when you blow it up to 6’, you can see anything that’s wrong with the picture. So usually we require pictures of 6 megabytes or better. We just got Diego Sanchez, which is perfect because he has a fight coming up on the 21st. So right now, we have Urijah Faber, Scott Smith, James Irvin, Mark Munoz, Chael Sonnen, Brandon Vera, Chad Mendes, Joseph Benavidez and Tara LaRosa.

PC: Are they available online only or through retail as well?

GD: Right now, we’re going online. We’re not sure if we will go retail. We actually have 4 different sizes that you can see on www.wallfighters.com. If you don’t want a big 6 footer on your wall, we have them all the way down to 1’1". We’re allowing the fighters 4 pictures on our store. We actually have 3 for Diego so he’ll be the first one to have all 4 poses. It makes more sense for the fighter because if you have 4 sizes and 4 different poses, that’s 16 different products that a fan can chose from and it’s more of an opportunity for a fan to purchase and that’s putting more money in the fighter’s pocket.

PC: I was wondering if the fighter’s benefited from the sale of these “Wall Fighters.”

GD: That’s why we do what we do. Our thing is we want to make money with the fighters and not off of the fighters. I know when you break it down, we’re paying the fighters off of the retail sale price. There is a cost for making them and other costs involved, but we’re paying them off of the retail price and not off of the profit. When it comes down to it, the fighters walk away with the biggest chunk of change.

PC: MMA fighters now have trading cards and you guys have produced “Wall Fighters.” Do you think this signifies that MMA is being looked at as a legitimate sport?

GD: My personal opinion is that MMA is a great sport. One-on-one sports are a true test of character and it’s the hardest thing that you will ever do because it’s so physically demanding. It’s mano y mano and when you lose, there is really no one to blame except yourself; although some of them try to blame the referee. I won’t say it’s mainstream until I can open up a newspaper and see the results from the UFC the night before or I see an Associated Press article on an MMA event. I’m a little bit disappointed that I can find boxing results in the paper here in Reno, but I can’t find any MMA results from anywhere. On the other hand, MMA is growing. They can’t stop it. It’s year round and it’s worldwide. I think it’s a sport that’s just going to continue to grow and grow and we’re right there providing the fans with a great product. It’s like a 2 million dollar printer; the same as Fathead. We use high grade industrial vinyl so you’re getting a quality product that’s not going to be rolling off the wall in 6 months. It’s definitely worthwhile.

PC: How big do you guys want to go with this? Can we expect a legend series with some of the MMA greats?

GD: My vision for the site is…well, we want you to be able to get your favorite MMA fighter, but eventually, I would like to have it where you can get your favorite combat sports fighter. We’ve got a commitment from the manager, but we want K-1 fighters up there. I want to have some of the wrestlers that make the Olympics, so they could pick up some money, and boxers. Any full contact sports participant, we want to make these wall papers accessible to their fans. It’s not costing the fighter anything and we don’t carry them in stores so it’s not costing us anything other than hosting the website. If there is a fighter out there that only sells 100 of them, then that’s more money he had in his pocket before he had it up there.

PC: Are you guys looking to maybe get a contract with different organizations as well?

GD: The thing is we want the fighters to get the biggest chunk of the money. If you bring in a 3rd party, it’s like a retail sale. It’s more people that have their hands in the pot so there is less to share. I wouldn’t rule out doing something like that as long as we could be in control of the situation where the fighters are not being used for their image or anything like that. It honestly would probably not be enough with having a 3rd party involved for the fighters to still get the majority of the money. It’s like the WalMart policy though; if I’m not going to make it up in a percentage, but I’m selling 1,000 of them now, then that’s how you make it up in numbers. It could be something down the road. As long as everybody can make money and be happy, then I wouldn’t rule that out. See, what we’re trying to do with the fighters is have a partnership. If you click on any of our fighters name, it talks about them and we provide a link to his website. So if people come to our site, they can go see his site from there and vice versa. Another thing we do is the link that we provide the fighter from our site always goes directly to their store. We don’t want them promoting our website. That’s my job to promote wallfighters.com. It’s the fighter’s job to promote themselves. So by going to their site and clicking on the link, it goes straight into their store.

PC: I think this is a great idea. Anything we could do at FightHype.com to help you guys out, let me know. Is there anything you want to say in closing?

GD: We think we have the right product and the right market. We want to get people out there to www.wallfighters.com. Right now we only have 10 fighters, but if someone out there is feeling like, “Man, I would love to see one of such-and-such fighter,” then go ahead and send us an email. That way, we could go to the fighter or the fighters representation and say, “Look we have 20 emails in from fans for your fighter. Look what you’re missing out on.”