Ex-Olympic wrestler on Calgary’s school of Hard Knocks Fighting

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Ari Taub, a corporate lawyer and former Olympic wrestler, has an eye for picking out talent – fighters, TV stars, social media personalities. And when he finds athletes who check all these boxes, he puts them in a caged octagon and lets them let loose mixed-martial-arts-style. (MMA) Mr. Taub runs Calgary's Hard Knocks Fighting, and if athletes win enough fights on its mat and enough fans around the world, they just might get make it into the big league: The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

What is Hard Knocks?

Hard Knocks is the premier mixed-martial-arts promoter in Canada. It is the place where athletes get competition experience and the TV exposure to get drafted into the UFC. Hard Knocks is considered a farm team for the UFC. In fact, Ronda Rousey, the highest-paid and generally considered the most popular MMA fighter in the world right now, came from Hard Knocks.

Hard Knocks is one of only four MMA promoters in the world that is on live TV in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America.

The athletes have a big problem right now: There's a lot of athletes and very few places for them to get competition experience. And even fewer for them to get TV exposure while they're getting competition experience. In order for athletes in this sport to get drafted into the UFC, which is always their goal, they need to be very good, have lots of competition experience, and be popular.

How did you become a feeder into the UFC?

I have an understanding of sport and amateur sport and how to develop athletes through wrestling and going to the Olympics. I always knew what I wanted to do was develop these athletes and give them a stage to perform on.

We'll take an athlete like Misha Cirkunov, a Toronto athlete who we just put into the UFC, and we'll say: 'Hey, what does he need? Does he need three or four competitions in the next six or eight months? Does he need to compete against guys who used to be in the UFC? Does he need a TV show documentary done about him so people know about him?' We'll do all of those things and we'll make Misha a priority within Hard Knocks so we get him the assets that he needs to go to the UFC.

How does a competitor get into Hard Knocks?

There's an application process that includes giving us your basic biographical information, sending us some video, [and] having social media accounts with a certain amount of following. These athletes need to be popular to go to the UFC. The UFC isn't necessarily about the best athletes in the world. It is about very good athletes that are very popular. It is a business. These guys are playing for money. They get paid on being popular. The UFC makes money based on popular athletes. The UFC would choose a good popular athlete over a great not-popular athlete.

How do women fit into Hard Knocks?

We have lots of female fighters. Ronda Rousey is both the highest-paid UFC athlete and one of the most popular female athletes in the world – she's in The Expendables 3 movie. She came from Hard Knocks. I think it is really important to have female fighters in Hard Knocks. We are going to see more and more of them. From a social level, it is really important to have an outlet to be physical and not necessarily be girly-girly all the time. In Calgary, if you look at junior-high and high school wrestling, there's more girls than guys that participate. I think that they learn something that's really significant in playing a contact sport, so I'm proud that Hard Knocks provides a place for women to get to play something that is not necessarily seen as traditional for women and we get to break the mould and progress.

How did you come up with this?

I didn't come up with it. My training partner walked into my office after the Olympics and said: 'I want to run this event. Will you do it with me?' I said: 'Sure.' When I started, I thought the business was about selling tickets. We didn't pay for lights or extra sound or TV crews or anything like that. Then, I got convinced we ought to record the video at a higher quality and then I got a deal with ESPN. Then, I decided I better learn about the TV business. Then, I spent the last couple of years learning about the TV business, and now I've been persuaded I need to learn about the advertising business.

Hard Knocks makes money through running live events and selling TV shows and partnering with brands to connect with fight-sport fans. We sell tickets to the events, we license TV shows, we sell advertising. In any other sport, the athletes would pay us entry fees. In this sport, we haven't yet progressed there. But that's where the sport is moving.