King to Pawn: Promoter Balks at Mayorga in MMA

In September 2009, I was told by Ricardo Mayorga (via an interpreter) that he had no contract with Shine Fights, the Florida-based promotion that had recently circulated his name. Within the same 24-hour period, Devin Price, Shine’s CEO, insisted they had a written agreement with Mayorga to fight.

You can see where this is going.

On Tuesday, Don King Productions, the high-hair-chaired entity that had signed a 2008 promotional contract with Mayorga, ordered Shine to cease publicizing Mayorga’s May 15 bout with Din Thomas that was scheduled to be held under mixed martial arts rules. The King group believes it’s a violation of their own agreement with Mayorga.

Mayorga filed suit against King late last year for what Mayorga claimed was a failure to honor their three-year deal: King allegedly did not offer him the volume of fights promised. Since this would be considered a breach, Mayorga apparently felt free to exercise his potential outside of King’s reach but wound up dropping the suit before any court resolution could be obtained. As a result, he’s stuck in a mess of contractual ambiguity. Just the guy you want to build your first pay-per-view event around.

Did Shine sign him and simply hope King wouldn’t notice? Was Mayorga using Shine to prompt King into action? Shouldn’t debate over the language of the existing agreement have been settled long before this fight was promoted? When Mayorga showed up for a press conference last month looking like an overinflated party balloon, was he indicating he wasn’t actually thinking about fighting?

I find it hard to believe Shine and Mayorga would have cemented plans and just hoped for the best, but the conversations I had in trying to figure out this confusion last fall were not encouraging: nobody seemed to have any reasonable explanation for why the other party wasn’t on the same page. Throw King into the mix and it’s napalm.

Update: In a press release, Shine's Price insisted the event would go on as scheduled. “Shine Fights has a valid and exclusive promotional contract with Ricardo Mayorga for mixed martial arts," he said. "King is Mayorga's boxing promoter. We are his MMA promoter.”