The coolest thing about that movie Men of Honor is when Robert De Niro says “The Navy Diver is not a fighting man, he is a salvage expert. If it is lost underwater, he finds it. If it’s sunk, he brings it up“. Replace ‘Navy Diver’ with ‘ZUFFA’ and you pretty much have exactly what Dana White has been doing for the past 3 years. When PrideFC went under, bought all of their pretty little japanese assets and pulled the best names from the organization including Rampage Jackson, Wanderlei Silva…really, anyone that has forced you jump out of bed at 3am in the morning because you thought they were slamming at your door. That crew of fighters.
They did the same thing with the Fox Sports backed IFL last year when they acquired what was left of that dying organization. Thing is, they really didnt do anything with the fighters and let all-stars like Chris Horodecki and Tim Kennedy just sort of float away to other organizations (they did sort of pick up Roy ‘Big Country’ Nelson for the 10th season of The Ultimate Fighter).
Now with the demise of Affliction, UFC has snatched up 20 contracts including the UK’s own Paul Daley who was scheduled to fight Jay Hieron at Affliction Trilogy. The UFC actually tried to snatch Jay Hieron but due to a freshly signed EA Sports MMA contract, he chose to go with Strikeforce instead (the UFC offered him two seperate deals, Hieron turned down both of them down). [Source]
