Last week, midway through a rant about his legal troubles, former Bellator lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez alluded to a troubling experience his friend, Zach Makovsky, had with Bellator management.
Between 2010 and 2011, Makovsky racked up a perfect 6-0 record within the promotion en route to winning season three's tournament, becoming Bellator's inaugural bantamweight champion, and subsequently fighting in two non-title fights. However things soon went south, as Makovsky lost his title in mid-2012 to Eduardo Dantas, then fell short against Anthony Leone in December before receiving his walking papers.
Makovsky is now scheduled to make his flyweight debut for his first post-Bellator fight this weekend at CFFC 24. Nonetheless, Alvarez's name-drop led Makovsky to explain what exactly went wrong with the promotion that once called him ‘champion.'
"Just before the Dantas fight, I had added some additional fights onto my contract for a potential raise," Makovsky told BloodyElbow.com. "If I were to beat Dantas, my pay scale would have gone up pretty significantly, and if I lost to Dantas, my pay scale would have stayed where it was. In that deal I put in that they have to have... they were going to give me three fights every 14 months. Which is a reason they gave me why, on releasing me. They said that they just couldn't keep me active enough to fulfill that end of their agreement.
"The issue I had was that... so when I signed [those] additional fights to my contract, I had a potential raise against Dantas, and if I lost the fight I was supposed to go back to where I was. But Bellator has it that you're at a certain rate, and if you win your pay goes up by 1,000/1,000 for your next fight and if you lose it stays the same. It never decreases. I won the tournament, I had two non title fights, so my pay scale increased for each of those fights. Then I signed this new part of the contract to fight Dantas, and if I lost I should have went back to where I was, not the original [salary], which is what they offered me. Basically what happened was, they weren't going to give me another fight in 2012, besides Dantas. I had to kind of really push to get that fight with Leone. And then when I got the bout contract it was for 2,000 and 2,000 less than what I believe my contract said I should be fighting for."
Obviously shorting a fighter $2,000/$2,000 less than their contract states is a serious issue when they're only fighting once or twice a year, and for a figure that is already far from lucrative. So, of course, Makovsky raised this point to Bellator officials.
"What they did say was, that if I insisted on getting what my contract said, they wouldn't be able to afford to put me on the card to fight for that, and that they could offer me this 2,000/2,000 less," Makovsky explained. "So if I wanted to fight this year it's basically... and it was my choice to accept the fight, but it was like 'you can accept this, or you can wait till next year and fight and do whatever.' That rubbed me obviously very poorly.
"I only had one [fight at that point in 2012] and I lost, so I didn't have my win bonus. This is all I do right now, so I definitely needed at least a second fight in a year. I kind of had to accept those terms. It was unfortunate, and I did what I had to do because I needed a fight. That's the story there and Eddie knew about it because we're good friends and we talk. I never wanted to bring it up."
