Time for Justin from TAR to chime in again. We all assumed that the TAR matches were on the up and up, although, I do believe that the players got cuts of the streams?
EDIT: To me I think that the key is that both sides POST before the day of the match. That right there eliminates most of the problem.
No player ever got a cut of PPV. In the gambling matches they were paid a fee and/or expenses and possibly cut of any DVD's that got made depending on the individual deal. In the early matches it all varied but there was never any spitting of revenue. This was done mainly for two reasons:
- It made it easy to tell a guy what the deal was.
- We didn't want to get into the whole "You owe me this or that" and having to go through the hassle of showing expenses and income to two different guys on every match.
Everyone knew exactly what each deal was going in with regards to what we as promoters were promising.
The later matches in the Studio we put up a prize fund for the guys to play for and set up the format. An example would be $5000 prize fund for a three discipline match that paid $1000 to the winner and $500 to loser for each discipline with the overall winner getting a $500 bonus and getting the call to come back and play again. Both guys got decent money for a weekend but there was enough worth playing for that it kept guys motivated.
Again individual formats and payouts varied but that was the basic way it was done for everything in the studio.
The way we did it was hard and put all of the risk on TAR. The players got paid no matter what the PPV turnout was. If we did good then we made some money. More than a few we lost money after expenses but there was never any of the BS like what we have seen lately.
Any fool can put on a fake show and chop up the gate and PPV. I turned down several offers by people who thought they were smart. My reputation was always worth more to me than a few thousand bucks.
