Bert Watson finally began to tell his side of the story.
The former event coordinator, who worked behind the scenes at UFC for more than a decade, said Wednesday MMA Hour Watson spoke about his split with UFC in 2015, stating only that at the time of his departure, an unnamed “person in authority” at UFC had questioned Watson's work and handling of the situation following confusion over transporting middleweight fighter Mark Munoz back to the fighters' hotel when Munoz needed extra time to make weight for a fight.
Watson recently published an autobiography. Being Bert Watsonaddressed the situation on Wednesday, opening up about the UFC executives he clashed with before ultimately leaving the promotion.
“With Mark Munoz, I mentioned his name, Mark missed the weigh-in. I don't normally do that, but he missed the weigh-in and it took him about an hour to make it,” Watson said. “They gave me an extra 30 minutes, a commission, to make sure he made it to the weigh-in. They gave me something they don't normally do, and he made it to the weigh-in.”
“At the time, UFC had a kid who was the sponsorship manager from a legal standpoint and allowed fighters to wear patches and stuff, but now they can't do that because there are certain sponsors that everyone can wear. The kid was not a very nice guy. Mike Mersch was not a very nice guy.”
Michael Mersch was UFC's senior vice president of business, legal and government relations for eight years before taking over as chief operating officer of the World Series of Fighting, and now runs his own law and consulting firm, according to his LinkedIn.
“He was being very rude to some people,” Watson said. “I knew that, so I tried to keep people away from him. That night, after Mark weighed in, I went back to the hotel, stopped off at the bar for my usual glass of Grand Marnier to calm down a bit, and the next thing I knew, my phone was ringing.”
After returning to the room, I received a call from Mersch and we had a heated discussion that ultimately led to him stepping down from his job with UFC.
“The phone rang and someone asked, 'Where are you?' I found the tone immediately disrespectful,” Watson said. “I'm from Philadelphia so I didn't mind it, but I kind of backed away. I said, 'Well, I'm in the room right now, why?' And he said, 'Yeah, I need to see you.' I first asked him to tone down his voice and stop being so disrespectful. Now I mean it nicely. And he said, 'Yeah, if you're not going to come in…'”
“When he said that, I stopped. And I wrote about it in the book, but in one shot, I was Angry Bart, Black Bart, Bad Bart and Angry Bart, all in one shot. I taunted him, and I said that if he didn't like it, one of us needed to go in another direction, because it got to the point where I felt like he and I couldn't function in the same space.
“He told me that no one was going to be on my side with that kind of crap. I was furious with him. At the end of the conversation I said to him, 'Look, why don't you just put this job on a chair and sit there?' That was a nice way of saying it, but after I said that, for some reason, within the next three or five minutes, he must have gone over to Dana. [White] To explain it, he went to Dana with his story.”
Watson said he ran into a UFC staff member when he came downstairs the next morning, who apparently informed him that he had suddenly quit and was no longer working for the company.
Watson decided to reschedule his flight home rather than argue or cause a fuss, but Mersch ultimately shared his version of the incident with UFC CEO Dana White, which he believes was the deciding factor.
“Dana heard the story that I quit, I badmouthed everybody, I talked bad about everybody, I went home,” Watson said. “That's the story they heard. It wasn't true.”
“Yeah, I told him to take the job and stick it in his ass, but I wasn't expecting someone to come to me and sort things out, I was expecting a conversation, and I didn't get that.”
Watson said days went by without any communication from UFC after he returned home and that the relationship was truly over.
“I didn't get a call,” Watson said, “and I didn't get asked why or anything. But he questioned my integrity and my work ethic and did it in a disrespectful way, and it put me on the left.”
While Watson doesn't regret his actions, he admits he was still hurt that no one from the UFC would reach out to him or at least listen to his side of the story.
Thus, his time with the UFC is officially over.
“I probably [gotten a call] “It was just the fact that I spent 14 years there,” Watson said, “that I thought was a good 14 years where I was never asked what happened or how it happened.”
“So right away, in my mind, they took any explanation he gave them as me despising him and quitting him, the company, the organization, the brand, everything. And that's what I took. I heard nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
