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Station Casino Brothers Push Ultimate Fighting

LAS VEGAS - On the surface it sounds like a spendy toy, a frivolous attempt by a pair of wealthy brothers to build an extreme sporting league.

But Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta III see their push to develop the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a potentially lucrative extension of their Station Casinos' experience, a company they've built into the dominant player in the Las Vegas locals gambling market.

"I think it's the whole brand focus, the whole brand identity," Lorenzo Fertitta said. "I think it's trying to be the category killer, really trying to dominate the space you compete in.

"I think it's really focused on trying to build a repeat customer base."

An estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people are expected to pay $30 to $300 a ticket to attend tonight's scheduled UFC bout at the MGM Grand.

The event - the seventh in the United States since the Fertittas bought the UFC a year ago for an undisclosed amount of money - is a step in what the brothers hope is the evolution of a trendy, new sport with a worldwide appeal.

Lorenzo, the 33-year-old younger brother of the 40-year-old Frank, drops the names of several countries where the league has or is about to sign over-the-air or pay-per-view TV deals.

Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, Brazil and Australia are onboard. Germany is about to sign-up.

The model for their approach is the extensively marketed World Wrestling Federation of Vince and Linda McMahon, the New York City-area couple who have built their once regional league into a global financial giant. Their offerings extend from broadcast TV to pay-per-view to video games to a failed attempt two years ago to develop a WWF-themed casino in Las Vegas with Wall Street backing.

Unlike the WWF, UFC bouts are not fixed, Fertitta said.

Unlike professional boxing, the fights employ a mix of glitz, glamour and music to produce spectacles in an octagon-shaped ring.

"It's like going to a rock concert. Your adrenaline is pumping," said Lorenzo Fertitta, a fan of hard rockers Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine. "Our biggest challenge now is getting a free TV program here in the United States, having that weekly commercial, that weekly television the WWF does so well, and I think we're very close."

He's the more visible of the brothers when it comes to talking publicly about the fighting league, which they paid for with their own money. The elder sibling, who routinely avoids news media interviews in his post as Station chairman, declined to be interviewed for this story.

The UFC has been around for nearly a decade but ran into troubles in the mid-1990s when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and forced cable TV operators to drop the UFC's pay-per-view fights.

McCain argued that the league's reputation for violent, no-holds-barred bouts created an ugly spectacle that should not appear on TV.

The senator's push came at a time when powerful political figures were leaning on Hollywood and the broadcast industry to limit TV and movie violence, and the lost exposure led to a decline in the league's revenue generating power.

Athletic commission bosses in Nevada and New Jersey banned UFC bouts in their states, arguing that the league failed to protect the safety of its fighters, prompting the bouts to be staged in Puerto Rico and other low-visibility sites.

Enter the Fertittas.

The Bishop Gorman graduates earned a reputation for building something of a jockocracy at Station Casinos, a company where fit, competitive thirty- and fortysomething men have pushed to become masters of their universe, whether it's in the locals gambling market, the lucrative development of the Gordon Biersch microbrew brand or the after-hours basketball leagues of Las Vegas.

In the late 1990s, the brothers grew fanatical about their personal fitness, undertaking four- and five-day-a-week workouts with a trainer who incorporated the techniques of competitive boxing and the martial arts, eventually leading to their interest in the troubled UFC, which incorporates both forms of combat.

"We thought we had an opportunity where we really had a diamond in the rough," Lorenzo Fertitta said of the league.

The former member of the Nevada Athletic Commission met with athletic commissioners in Nevada and New Jersey to develop a new set of rules that would allow UFC fights to be staged in the two casino states.

Elbow strikes to the head are now forbidden, and fighters can now longer throw their opponents onto their heads. The changes have prompted a positive response from McCain.

"I am pleased that the new owners of the Ultimate Fighting Championship have adopted rules to better protect the safety of its fighters," the former Republican presidential candidate said. "I hope that this change signals that this previously barbaric and exploitative style of fighting will evolve into a true sport."

Nevada State Athletic Commission Executive Director Marc Ratner struck a similar tone in discussing the changes.

"They have done everything we asked them," Ratner said. "They put rounds in, judges in, and it's being run like a sport."

Yet there's still something about the league that doesn't sit right with many, and the brothers have seen that wariness in the quizzical looks of family, friends and business associates.

"My wife actually at first wasn't crazy about it, and she was no different than my parents," Lorenzo said, "but these fighters are real guys. They're educated. They're sharp. They can speak."

He also points to a UFC customer base that draws customers with a median age of 25 to 28 and a household income ranging from $45,000 to $50,000, both of which Fertitta said skew higher than the WWF's numbers.

Despite the talk of global branding, product synergies, solid demographics and money-making opportunities, Fertitta speaks of another reason for owning the league.

"I truly enjoy being involved in the entertainment part of it, the sporting event part of it," he said. "It's a rush. It's like opening a casino. Camaraderie, it's fun. Six times a year me and Frank we don't have to do a lot of work. We show up at the fight. It's your fight. It's cool."

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