The stark contrast between Mark Kerr’s financial success in Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships and the struggles of early UFC competitors reveals just how different the MMA landscape was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While most American fighters were barely making ends meet, Kerr was walking through airports with $150,000 cash stuffed into his cowboy boots.
During his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Kerr revealed the reality of getting paid in Pride FC: “The next day you would go up to a room, and you literally would have a room. You’d have an adjacent room, usually Japanese guys in black suits smoking. And then you’d have this room, which is where you get paid. They had these suitcases that had your pay. You could choose your currency.”
The largest check Kerr received was “a little over half a million” dollars – an astronomical sum for MMA at the time. But getting that money home proved to be an adventure in itself. “My first couple times over there, I put 40 something thousand in one cowboy boot with the two socks. I put 40,000 in the other cowboy boot with the two socks,” Kerr explained.
The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on him. “Big giant guy with 15 grand. That does not look good,” he laughed, describing how suspicious he must have appeared walking through customs with cash-stuffed boots.
Meanwhile, back in America, the UFC was hemorrhaging money and could barely afford to pay its fighters. When the organization approached Kerr to compete against Pete Williams after their first sanctioned event in New Jersey, their offer was insulting: “We’ll give you like an appearance fee of like 15 grand to fight and then it would be doubled if I won.”
For context, Kerr was making hundreds of thousands per match in Japan. “I’m making, you know, a lot more in Japan. Like, why would I go do it?” The UFC’s justification was that fighters should “believe in what we’re doing” despite the massive pay cut.
Even Joe Rogan, who would become the voice of the UFC, was struggling financially in those early days. From 1997-1998, Rogan worked UFC events for little money, and it was actually costing him to do the job.
“I quit and I did it for like a year and a half, two years maybe. And then in 98, I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I’m just, it’s just actually costing me money.”
Kerr recognized the importance of elevating MMA’s image and worked to change perceptions. “I wanted to change the narrative of like, when you looked at the early UFC’s, it looked like some guys were just scraped off a bar stool and thrown into the octagon,” he explained. “I wanted to be considered professional. I wanted to carry myself as a professional.”
This meant investing in expensive suits for press conferences and maintaining high standards, even when he couldn’t afford it. “I couldn’t afford it, but I was in a thousand Calvin Klein suit that had put on a charge card, but I wanted to change the narrative.”
Today’s UFC champions earn millions, but it was icons like Kerr who helped establish MMA as a legitimate professional sport.
