Couture Finally Speaks Out on Lawsuit

He breached his employment contract, not his fighter contact.  Gray Maynard, Sean Sherk, etc. do not have employment contracts.  The main crux of the lawsuit is that the IFL is naming a team after him (Extreme Couture).

to me all of it doesn’t matter, Randy will be destroyed by Fedor.  I think Randy would be served well to never fight again.  Name a great fighter he has beaten recently???  all of this a joke and hopefully will work itself out so we can all see how bad Fedor will make Randy look and we’ll all forgot the lawsuit and stuff.

This garbage could have been avoided if Zuffa and Fedor could have come to some middle ground.  Zuffa is getting a bad rep for being inflexible to allow Fedor to do his yearly Sambo tourney.  Fedor is getting a bad rep because by not signing with the UFC he is getting accused of being afraid to fight in a cage and ducking some of the UFC top heavyweights. 

That’s why Couture wants out of his contract, he came out of retirement in the hopes of getting to fight Fedor.  He came out of retirement around the same time Zuffa bought PRIDE and he thought Fedor would come to the UFC to unify his belt with whoever was holding the UFC belt.  Because Fedor didn’t come to the UFC, Couture saw no further reason to stay with UFC as he wasn’t going to get the fight he wanted.  So instead of Zuffa just letting him out of his contract or doing a copromotion with M1 like they did with PRIDE a few times, so he’s stuck in limbo.

Pay issues also came into play for as he didn’t think he was getting a fair shake with payoffs.  Fighters with lower billing and rankings were making more at a major card than he as champion of the heavyweight division was and he felt disrespected by that.  So it’s a multitude of things that have lead to current state of affairs.  I think Randy vs Minitauro would’ve been a good match but we’ll never know.  Hopefully somebody can get Couture and Zuffa to compromise and we can get back to business as usual.

I’m not sure exactly what contract he breached. The lawsuit states that he breached the contract he signed on December 29, 2006. I’m not sure if that is an employment contract or not since he was already steadily commentating at every UFC event before then. It’s hard to tell.

As far as the Xtreme Couture thing goes, the UFC had the opportunity to prevent Randy from using his last name in the naming of his gym before he even opened it and they didn’t, they said it was fine. He has no written contract with the IFL and won’t even be present at the event probably. He’s not the only person that owns a share of the company, Shawn Tompkins does as well, thus why he’s representing the gym through the IFL.

I completely understand if the UFC wanted to sue Couture for constantly bad-mouthing them in the media while still under contract, that’s understandable. But to take him to court for something that in reality, is partly the UFC’s own fault for not preventing it sooner, makes no sense.

It’s a sad state of affairs. I just wish that there was some way both sides could make up and everything would back to the way it was. Sadly, there’s not.

The UFC wouldn’t have been able to prevent him from naming his gym after himself.  They can however prevent him from providing his name and likeness to another organization. It’s irrelevant as to whether Randy shows up at the event.  The fact is that the IFL is advertising Team Extreme Couture vs. say Ken Shamrock’s Lion Den.  This leads people to believe that Randy Couture will be there, which is a direct violation of his employment contract.  This contract doesn’t prevent him from cornering fighters, but it does prevent him from promoting or being associated with other organizations.  If Randy’s gym was called LA Martial Arts, there would be no lawsuit. 
Every other team is named after their celebrity coach.  When the Militech Fighting System team is fighting you know you’ll be able to see Pat there or Renzo when the Gracie team is fighting.  A reasonable person would assume that Randy Couture will be there when Extreme Couture is fighting.  The fact that there’s not a signed contract is also irrelevant as Randy is letting them use his name, which I find very strange as Randy has always been hyper protective of his name and likeness.  Randy should be smart enough to know that this is direct violation of his contract and I think he’s doing this as an F you to the UFC.  I also imagine that as soon as Randy’s contract is up he’ll immediately sign a contract with the IFL.

UFC will hurting itself.
the longer they try to hassle Randy the more:
- people will hate Dana
- people will check out other international MMA organizations
- it takes away   from their own existing HW contenders who are awesome Nogueira, Gonzaga, Kongo, Sylvia, Herring.
People constantly are repeating the fact that they don’t care about the right and wrong of contracts - they just repect Randy. The idea of Dana just saying   OK no   hard feelings, Fight Fedor in UFC / M-1 could be so esy stil!  A 1 time special event which no other fighter is going to ask for since no one else is going to have the status of being a hall of famer who was not only at early UFC but early birth of the sport. Fedor could fight Sambo. If I was Dana I’d be rooting for Couture to beat Fedor (a long shot in a ring without elbows).  not chuck even - caue he’s not currently champ.

The UFC definitely could have prevented Couture from naming the gym after himself. It’s common knowledge that every contract that the UFC makes a fighter sign includes an ancillary rights agreement, which allows the UFC to control said fighter’s image. If the UFC didn’t want Couture to use his last name in naming the gym, they certainly could have done something about it or at least attempted to until Couture most likely would have resigned and this whole situation would have developed regardless.

I agree with you in the sense that the crux of the lawsuit has to deal with the name “Couture” being used in the IFL and that casual fans will assume that he is connected with the IFL in some way. All I’m saying is that the UFC could have attempted to prevent this from happening before it did.

I was under the impression that Randy maintained his ancillary rights under this contract, but not the right to use his name or likeness to help promote other organizations.  I believe that was the one of the sticking points in Randy’s first disagreement with the UFC when he originally left, and he made sure to get an exception when he resigned his latest contract. 

But if the UFC did have to give Randy the ok to use his own name on his gym, don’t you think Dana was ok’ing it to throw Randy a bone.  I’m sure Dana didn’t forsee Randy using the name for a “rival” organization. 
Great work on this story so far, I’ll keep checking the site to see how this all plays out.

Yeah, I remember he mentioned that the ancillary rights were one of the reasons why he left the UFC the first time all the way back in 2000 but I’m not sure how exactly those rights were set upon in his most recent deals.

Oh, I’m sure that White had no idea that Couture was either going to resign or use the name of his gym for the benefit of the IFL or any other organization for that matter. Even if setting up a fight with Fedor in the UFC was that big of a deal, I’m not sure that White even realized the magnitude of it since he likely thought that he had Fedor in the bag throughout most of their negotiations.

I figure that we will eventually find out more about everything once the lawsuit finally picks up in court. Both sides are going to have to let all of the skeletons out of the closet then.