Burt Watson finally reveals story behind UFC split in 2015
Burt Watson is finally telling his side of the story.
The former event coordinator, who spent more than a decade in a backstage role with the UFC, opened up Wednesday on The MMA Hour about his split with the promotion back in 2015. At the time he left the UFC, Watson only stated that an unnamed “person of authority” in the UFC questioned his work and how Watson handled things following confusion surrounding transportation for middleweight fighter Mark Munoz back to the fighter hotel after Munoz needed additional time to make weight for his bout.
Watson, who just recently released his autobiography Being Burt Watson, addressed the situation Wednesday and revealed the UFC executive he butted heads with before ultimately leaving the promotion.
“There was a situation with Mark Munoz, I’m mentioning names, and Mark had missed weight, and he doesn’t normally do that but he missed weight and he had an hour or so to make weight,” Watson said. “They gave me an extra half an hour, meaning the commission, for him to make weight. They gave me that, which they don’t normally do, they gave it to me, he made weight.
“At the time, the UFC had this young man who was a sponsorship manager from a legal standpoint, where they were just letting guys wear patches and stuff, and now they can’t because they’ve got a certain sponsor that everybody wears. That young man was not a very nice person. Mike Mersch was not a very nice person.”
Michael Mersch was the senior vice president of business, legal, and government affairs at the UFC for eight years before leaving that role to become the chief operating officer at World Series of Fighting. According to his Linkedin, he now owns his own legal and consulting firm.
“He was very disrespectful to some people when he spoke to them,” Watson said. “I knew that so I tried to keep people away from him. That night, after Mark made weight, I went back to the hotel, stopped at the bar and got myself my typical shot of Grand Marnier, just to kind of ease me down a little bit, and I went up to the room and the next thing I know my phone rings.”
It was after returning to his room that he received a call from Mersch that led to a heated conversation, which ended with him quitting his job at the UFC.
“The phone rings and somebody says, ‘Where are you?’ in a tone that I felt was disrespectful right away,” Watson said. “I’m from Philly, I kind of let that go, but I backed up a little bit. I said, ‘Well, I’m up in my room, why?’ He said, ‘Well, I need to see you.’ I said first off, you need to take that bass out of your voice and stop talking to me in a disrespectful manner.’ Right now, I’m being nice with the way I said it. He said, ‘Well, if you don’t get down here…’
“When he said that, I stopped. I went — and I say this in the book — in one shot he got mad Burt, Black Burt, hood rat Burt, and upset Burt, all in one shot. I cursed him O-U-T, and I said to him, it got to a point where I was feeling that he and I could not function in the same space, and if he didn’t like that, one of us needed to go in a different direction.
“He said to me, no one was going to side with me on some silly shit like that. I went off on him. At the end of that conversation, I said to him, ‘You know what? You can take this job and put it on a seat of a chair and sit on it.’ That was nice, what I just said, the way I said it. But I said that, and somehow within the next three minutes or five minutes or so, he must have gone to Dana [White] to explain that. He went to Dana with his story.”
Watson said the next morning he went downstairs and ran into members of the UFC staff who apparently had been informed that he abruptly quit and was no longer working for the company.
Rather than argue or making a scene, Watson decided to just change his flight plans and return home, but he believes Mersch ultimately told his version of the incident to UFC CEO Dana White and that was the nail in the coffin.
“Dana had gotten the story and they had gotten the story that I had just quit, bad mouthed everybody, talked about everybody and I had gone home,” Watson said. “That’s the story that they got. That was not true.
“Yes, I did tell him to take that job and stick it up his rear. But not that I expected anyone to come to me and smooth things over, but I expected a conversation, which I did not get.”
After Watson returned home, he said days passed without any contact from the UFC, and that really was end of that relationship.
“I never got a phone call,” Watson said. “I was never asked why or anything. But he questioned my integrity, he questioned my work ethic, and he did it in a way that was disrespectful, and I went to the left.
While he doesn’t regret his actions, Watson admits it still hurt that nobody from the UFC ever reached out to him to at least get his side of the story.
With that, his time with the UFC officially came to a close.
“I was probably more struck that I hadn’t [gotten a call] because of the fact that I had spent 14 years there,” Watson said. “Fourteen good years, I thought, that I was not asked what happened or how it happened.
“So right away in my head, it said that they took whatever explanation he gave as me disrespecting him and me quitting on him, the company, the organization, the brand and everything else. That’s the way I took it. I heard nothing. Absolutely nothing.”