If you talk to enough fighters, you’ll pick up on one of their greatest pet peeves, which is hearing from fans about their parlays. I can remember Payton Talbott telling me that the most annoying thing about our times is when a fan comes up to him and says, “Good luck tomorrow, I have you by knockout in the first round,” or “Dude, congratulations, but I needed you to win by submission.”
The solipsism of the sports gambler leads him to believe that all anybody (outside of himself) cares about is the actionizing of hunches.
Advertisement
Then again, these are our times. DraftKings is not only a major sponsor of the UFC’s, it’s a sportsbook that sponsors the bulk of the sports world. Live odds are flashed on the screen in the middle of fights as commonly as stats. FanDuel, Caesars, William Hill. The toothpick-chewing bookies of yesteryear are now sleek-looking apps on your phone, offering discount codes for first time bettors to get in on the action.
Just punch in FIGHTFIX and receive $200 on your first $5 played.*
When the betting line shifted dramatically for Isaac Dulgarian’s fight with Yadier del Valle this past Saturday, the red flags went up at the books. Dulgarian was a sizable favorite at the start of the day, but as the day wore on the line shrank from -270 on some books to around -150. Third parties who monitor such action contacted the UFC to see what they knew. The UFC, according to Dana White, went directly to Dulgarian and his lawyer to ask point blank if there was anything to know. Dulgarian (and his lawyer) said of course not, if they were fixing anything they were fixing to break del Valle’s nose.
That was good enough for the UFC to proceed with the fight.
Advertisement
Which they did and…
Ooof.
Even casual observers were stunned to see Dulgarian throwing punches through the threat of the rear-naked choke rather than prying the arms off his neck. It ended in a first-round submission for del Valle, and I saw somebody point out that the footage would end up more scrutinized than the Zapruder tape. The ease in which del Valle got Dulgarian in the situation was … problematic, too. Irrational even. It was fishy enough that the UFC, who was already monitoring things for foul play, contacted the FBI immediately (as White told TMZ on Tuesday). The FBI has since begun a probe, and in the meanwhile Dulgarian has been cut from the UFC and the Nevada Athletic Commission is holding his fight purse.
Advertisement
Innocent until proven guilty, of course, but “it doesn’t look good” for Dulgarian, as Dana says. It certainly doesn’t. And it doesn’t look good for the UFC, who had a similar incident happen three years ago when Darrick Minner’s line swung abruptly in Shayilan Nuerdanbieke’s favor ahead of their fight, as word got out that Minner was compromised with an injury. That resulted in the exile of Minner’s coach, James Krause, who had emerged as one of the most reliable fight game handicappers in all the Midwest.
Dulgarian, it has been pointed out, spent time training with Krause. Associations like these really get to cooking when wrapped in tin foil.
You had to wonder how long it would be before we’d see a scandal of this kind pop up again. I had a friend text me when the story began to blow up earlier this week, “OK, O/U .5 — how many fights get fixed on a given card?” On moral grounds, I stand by the under.
Advertisement
But these are our times. Look what’s happening in the NBA with Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier. Integrity is what drives competition, but a prize ring particularly loves its prizes. Especially when you’re fighting on an APEX card making peanuts to do your job next to those in the broader sports world making fortunes to do theirs.
I guess the word that comes to mind is “susceptible.”
In any case, you can see the inherent conflicts of the two worlds. People these days speak all dialects of sports gambling: Same game parlays, teasers, moneylines, props, over/unders, chalk talk, juice, buying off the hook. To see athletes as conduits to good fortune is a natural default to a degenerate, so why wouldn’t it be for … you know … those looking to maybe (allegedly) control the puppet strings just a little bit?
It’s long been a problem in the fight game, even if we hear about it far less than we used to. There was a significant stretch through the 20th century when the mob controlled the boxing ring. “The fix is in” was one of the most popular phrases in the English language from the 1920s well into the 1960s. Yet it goes back much further than that, all the way to the London prize ring in the early 1800s. When A.J. Liebling romanticized Pierce Egan’s book “Boxiana” in his own writing, he included the unsavory elements, too, while giving insight as to where these phrases come from.
Yadier del Valle secures a rear-choke submission against Isaac Dulgarian in a controversial fight that has prompted an FBI investigation.
(Chris Unger via Getty Images)
“A ‘cross fight’ was a bout in which one of the combatants had agreed to lose,” Liebling wrote of those days 200 years ago. “A ‘double cross’ was one in which the man who had agreed to lose doesn’t.”
Advertisement
Dulgarian, if he’s found to out to be guilty, will never be accused of being a double-crosser, which is perhaps a small consolation for this whole mess. Yet what this situation ends up doing is opening up the full spectrum of fight-fixing suspicions, extending to the judges and referees whenever something suspicious happens. In boxing, suspicions of the fix are still everywhere to be found, and judges like Adelaide Byrd have heard about it plenty. Fight-fix accusations are rampant for anybody who’s watched a Jake Paul fight. Every time Paul appears, the “fix is in” shouts drown out all voices on social media.
He got so sick of hearing it he hired the powerful lawyer Alex Spiro to take legal action against the loudest within those choruses.
In MMA, it’s been a much smaller chorus. That is, up until Dulgarian (seemingly) bleached his black belt against del Valle. The chorus is bound to swell now with anything that looks off-center. The UFC will need to be guarded against such activities far more than it ever has, because sports gambling and the fight game are now part of the same machine. They are intertwined. In a handicapper’s world, paranoia is the most common side effect, and here’s guessing we’ll be dealing in that paranoia for a while going forward.
What happened with Dulgarian throws the integrity of fighting into question, because lines only tend to jump when somebody crosses the line.
*This is not a valid code, I use it only as an example.
