Meet the man behind the scenes at UFC
Walking backward through the bowels of Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, Burt Watson bellows out one of his many "Burtisms," which UFC fighters have heard for more than a decade.
“It’s your fight, baby!” Watson yells as he leads a fighter and his entourage to the octagon.
Dana White may be the UFC president. The Fertitta brothers own all but a few percentage points of the world’s most successful mixed martial arts organization. But from the first preliminary of the night until the main event, Watson is the man in charge on fight nights as the organization’s site coordinator.
You can usually find Watson in a ball cap, dark-framed glasses and a red UFC T-shirt as he shifts from taskmaster to motivator to counselor seamlessly throughout the night. At 62, he’s altered his approach some — he no longer slogs to each fighter’s dressing room as often — as he prefers to allow his deep, gravelly voice to echo down the cement hallways of the arenas.
“One night when the dressing rooms were so far away and I was running around everywhere, my foot was as big as my head at the end of the night,” Watson told FOXSports.com as he prepped for Saturday night’s UFC on FOX event in Chicago. “That’s when I started screaming, `Five minutes, one to five before we go live and dirty 30 (seconds)!’ I saw that it worked. It keeps me awake and lets the fighters know when it’s time to roll.”
Watson’s chief task, along with setting up before the fight, is ferrying the fighters to and from the octagon. He intentionally avoids watching any of the fights during downtime between bouts, to remain emotionally removed from the action.
“I genuinely care about these guys,” Watson said. “I’m there to get them what they need. I know how to care for and motivate them, something I learned from being a father and raising my own kids.”
And it doesn’t matter if you’re on the top of the card or on the first fight of the prelims, like Joseph Sandoval was at UFC on FX.
“I mean it in the nicest way ever, but Burt is the craziest person you’ll ever meet,” Sandoval said after his loss to Nick Denis. “But if you need anything, it’s there for you. He has everything taken care of. It’s like having your mom there. Burt is going to take care of you. If you want something done, you just ask him and he gets it.”
Watson seemingly has the motivation part down.
“He’s awesome,” said Charlie Brenneman, who was on the undercard at UFC on FX. “It’s one of those things that even if you’re not ready to fight, you hear Burt and, all of a sudden, you’re ready. Your stomach goes, ‘Oh, it’s fight time!’ When he says, `Five to 10 (minutes)’ and then `Let’s Roll,’ you know it’s time.”
Watson joked that he may have had the fighters a little over-hyped last Friday, when all but two of the 10 fights on the card ended in submissions or knockouts.
“I always tell them when they’re walking out not to leave it to the judges because they’re just going to make you cry,” Watson said. “Everybody was getting knocked out early, so maybe I should stop saying that.”
Watson, who still resides in his native Philadelphia, has been in the fight game nearly his entire life, although most of that time was in boxing. He served as boxing great Joe Frazier’s manager for nearly 15 years and was understandably shaken by the former heavyweight champ’s death at age 67 from liver cancer in November.
“Now that Joe is gone, one of the things that stood out were those 20-hour drives from Philly to Florida,” Watson said. “Both of us were afraid of heights and afraid of flying. I remember him trying to sing during those drives. Back then that kind of got on my nerves, but it’s just one of those things you will never forget.”
Some of his boxing buddies looked askew at Watson after White approached him about working at UFC — a money-losing organization at the time that still had a stigma from the no-holds-barred gladiator tournament days of the early 1990s.
“A couple of times people laughably called me a traitor,” Watson said. “I know they were laughing when they said it, but most people who laugh when they say (stuff) like that mean it.”
The UFC provided something boxing couldn’t: stability. Instead of the tentative schedule of boxing, White handed Watson a 12-month schedule that was solid. Watson has served as site coordinator since UFC 31 in May 2001 and has missed only a handful of events since.
“Fighters are fighters,” Watson said when asked if there was difference in temperament between boxers and MMA competitors. The backgrounds of the fighters, Watson said, are often divergent.
“They all have to make weight and get into the ring or the cage against somebody who is trying to kick their ass,” Watson said. “Boxers, for the most part, became boxers for survival and to make money to get out of the neighborhood. If you’re in a room with 10 MMA guys, seven or eight are college-educated. Money is not their only motivation. MMA was just something that could extend what they were doing in college, like wrestling. Most aren’t trying to escape the neighborhood.”
Losses, no matter if it’s boxing or MMA, are taken hard.
“When they lose, they cry,” Watson said. “It’s like when somebody beat up your kid for their lunch money and they run home in tears.”
Watson sounds almost disappointed as UFC’s expansion has led to overlapping events, meaning he can’t be there for each bout. It’s a feeling that the former boxing event coordinator who worked behind the scenes for bouts involving Oscar De La Hoya, Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson didn’t think he’d feel when he began in UFC.
“I had no idea what the UFC was all about,” Watson acknowledges. “I’m from Philly, a boxing town. I knew about Bruce Lee from TV and the movies, and that’s just about it. At first this was just another job, a job I was happy to get.”
Now he’s vested in the sport so much so that one of his five grandchildren, a 6-year-old named Ryan, has told anybody who will listen that he’ll be fighting in the UFC by age 11.
“I had no idea that it’d get as big as it has,” Watson said.
