Mailbag: On Bella Mir, family influence in fighting, and Dana White’s $11 million boast

How involved should fighters’ families be in their careers, in or out of the cage? And what did Bella Mir’s loss in Dana White’s Contender Series tell us about her future prospects?

Plus, Dana White says one DWCS fighter has made $11 million in the UFC. What’s that about? All that and more in this week’s mailbag. To ask a question of your own, hit up @BenFowlkesMMA on X or @Ben_Fowlkes on Threads.

@BiasedBrazilian: What’s your take on having a close relative or a spouse as your head coach? It would seem natural if your father is a former UFC champion but isn’t it complicated? Before you know, your mom is talking trash to your former opponents on instagram or something.

I think it’s like having backyard chickens: Seems like a great idea at first and you wonder why everyone doesn’t do it — then you find out. I remember the late, great Robert Follis telling me about a time when he tried explaining to former UFC champ Miesha Tate why her then-boyfriend Brian Caraway shouldn’t also be her coach, as he had been for years by that point.

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To be her partner at home and her coach in the gym? It’s like holding a cup of water, Follis said. You can hold it for five, 10 minutes, no problem. It’s nothing. But try holding it all day, every day. It’ll wear anyone out. When you look at fighters who are or have been coached by parents, I think you often see situations where either the growth eventually stopped or the familial relationship itself was destroyed. (Embarrassing your child on social media after a loss by getting all Dance Mom on it is one way to strain that relationship.)

It’s a lot of stress to put on yourselves and most people can only sustain that in a productive way for so long.

But for all those people claiming Bella Mir got “fraud-checked” in her DWCS fight. She’s 23, five fights into her pro career, and she lost a close decision. That’s it. That’s how fighters learn and grow. She looked to me like she thought she’d steamroll Alex Apodaca and when that didn’t happen she failed to move quickly enough toward a plan B, so she lost. That’s inexperience as much as anything else.

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If she were just another fighter with a last name that meant nothing in this sport, you’d think 4-1 was a good start. Of course, she’s not. She doesn’t get to develop in relative anonymity the way others do. There are pros and cons to that, but let’s not act like this was a final judgment on her potential. It wasn’t. It was just one fight, very early into a young fighter’s career. Now let’s wait and see what she takes from it.

@sbf_combat: In your last column, you said that Khabib BARELY edges Islam’s career legacy, which is baffling to me. Islam is miles ahead of Khabib now in terms of accomplishments, longevity and quality of opponents. I don’t see how people rank him above Izzy, Usman, Volk, Couture, and DC?

Nobody’s saying that Islam Makhachev isn’t in the GOAT conversation. But what’s his best overall win? Just going by who he beat, how, when in their careers he beat them, and what it meant, who’s his prize pelt on the wall?

I might say it’s Charles Oliveira, whom Makhachev absolutely smoked in order to claim the title. That’s a good win, but does it top the stretch where Khabib Nurmagomedov finished Conor McGregor, Dustin Poirier (whom Makhachev also beat, though in less dominant fashion), and current lightweight champ Justin Gaethje? I’m not sure.

Nurmagomedov didn’t just win all his fights; he won all his rounds. He was dominant in a way Makhachev hasn’t been. Granted, Makhachev moved up a weight class and Nurmagomedov didn’t. But Makhachev right now doesn’t feel like he’s as far ahead of everyone else as his coach was. Though there’s still time for him to make more of a case, and I suspect he will.

@ewillcock: Is there a DWCS fighter you suspect has made $11 million? Or is Dana #JustSayingStuff?

There absolutely could be one. But if there is, and if you want to tell us about it in order to make some point about the success of the Contender Series or whatever, why not just tell us who it is? Why be all cryptic about it? Why say anything at all if you don’t want to tell us the whole story? Throwing out these decontextualized numbers with no names attached is weirdly more suspicious than just keeping quiet about fighter pay altogether.

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But at this point I also have to take issue with some of my colleagues in the MMA media. This week I saw a couple headlines saying that Dana White had “revealed” what one DWCS fighter had made over the course of his UFC career. No, my friends. The word you’re looking for is “claimed.” He claimed there was an unnamed fighter (Kevin Holland says it’s not him) who’s made this. He offered you zero proof. He gave you no way to fact-check him. He just threw out a number and trusted that you’d run with it. Nothing at all was revealed.

White is a man with many fans and many detractors, but the fact is that he has lied to us before. I’m not saying he’s lying here. This claim may be totally accurate. That doesn’t mean we should immediately believe it just because the UFC boss said it.

@michal_sobak: What do you think the UFC’s plans are for the light heavyweight division, especially regarding the title fight? And when was the last time you remember a division being in this much of a mess?

I feel like the UFC light heavyweight division has found itself in these messes more than most. Going back many years now, the trend has been one dominant champion (Chuck Liddell, Jon Jones) followed by a chaotic game of hot potato with the belt once that champ is either dethroned or departs.

Personally, I hate interim titles. They just seem so … empty. If Carlos Ulberg can come back and defend the belt within a reasonable time frame, I say wait for him. It’s not like there is any specific fight crying out to be made. We’d just be throwing together two 205-pounders and arbitrarily giving a hunk of leather and metal to the winner. That’s not fooling anyone.

@BTM99_MMA: Elephant in the room: Womens title fights – last good one??

I was at MSG for Shev/Zhang – it killed the energy.

Move these to ‘Prelim Main Events’?

Lose the ‘DEI co-main’ 5 round snooze fests

OK, first of all, before we go throwing around terms like “DEI” to describe two people beating the hell out of each in a cage for money, let’s remember that we’re talking about the UFC. It’s arguably the most right-wing major sports organization out there and very openly so. It also has a reputation for only doing things that make sense for the bottom line. The idea that these people are only doing women’s fights to satisfy some imaginary quota requirement is laughable. They do it because it makes them money.

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As for why the women’s title fights are five-rounders, it’s because they’re MMA title fights. That’s how it works. Move them wherever you want on the card, but they’ve still got to be five rounds.

I agree that we’re seeing a lull in the women’s divisions right now. I’ve even written about it very recently. But we’ve seen lulls in other divisions too and those weren’t permanent conditions. What we’re missing right now are the right styles and personalities, but there’s some hope on the horizon.

@Screenplaya: Is NOW the time to put an end to weight-cutting? Change the classes, and just get on with it? The UFC will call fights “catch-weight” regularly (as Bellator did) until fighters get their s*** together, if necessary. Does the death of PPV make this possible?

There are two big obstacles to eliminating weight-cutting. One is the fighters themselves. They’re all in a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma. They know they’re only putting themselves through the torment of weight-cutting because, if they don’t, their opponents will do it and gain a size advantage on them. If they could all mutually agree to just stop, they’d all end up fighting mostly the same people, who are mostly the same size of them, only without that added bit of fight week misery. Trouble is, they don’t trust each other to stick to that promise. So it continues.

The other obstacle is the complete lack of will to address it. The UFC could put a stop to it, or at least strongly disincentivize it. State athletic commissions could do the same, though only if they all did it together. (California has tried, but no one else seems willing to help.) The will to do any of that just isn’t there, maybe because these power brokers don’t feel like it affects them enough. So it continues.

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@GulsethMichael: What are your thoughts on NDSU’s move to FBS, and how do you think they will fare?

I don’t get it. It’s the same thing I think whenever anyone floats the idea of my beloved Montana Grizzlies leaving the FCS and the Big Sky Conference in order to chase bigger money and bigger opponents in the FBS.

Why go be an afterthought in a higher division when you have a championship legacy in this one? You have zero chance to ever win the national championship again as long as you’re in the FBS. Is it worth it? Because it doesn’t sound like a good time to me.

@jaypettry: There’s a UFC card every Saturday until Thanksgiving, which will be likely off to conclude a 19-weekend run. How do you choose to handle a breakneck calendar like that?

In a way the busy calendar makes things easier on the MMA media. Every week, they know what they’re doing. It’s the usual fight week carousel, resetting every week, over and over and over. It’s when we go a few weeks between events that people have to get creative. If anything, endless fight weeks breed a certain type of laziness.

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Still, there is a certain comfort in knowing, without even needing to check, that there are fights every Saturday night. I just don’t know if football season is the best possible time for it.