After MMA retirement: Mac Danzig on training, financial struggles, UFC job, lawsuits

Mac Danzig

Life is a hustle these days for Mac Danzig.

From the time he rises at 6 a.m. to get his 6-year-old daughter off to school until he gets home to grab a late dinner, it’s nothing but contending with the morass of Los Angeles traffic for the 35-year-old single dad.

Danzig works with fighters four times per day in three different locations spread across the L.A. area. His hope is, at the end of the day, he’ll have made more money than he’s spent on gas.

That’s life for Danzig since he retired from the UFC in March 2014. A retirement that, he told MMAjunkie, was brought on in the hope that he was leaving the sport in time for his daughter to grow up with a fully cognizant father.

“When you have this little person that you care so much for, I can’t be putting myself through that any more,” Danzig said. “So, with that in mind, and the problems that I dealt with as far as concussions, I said I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m a mess at a fairly young age, and what I mean by that is in my 50s or 60s.”

Retirement was a long time coming for Danzig. He admitted that his enthusiasm for the sport began to wane when he jumped into the pressure cooker of the UFC after winning Season 6 of “The Ultimate Fighter.”

“All of that stuff just sort of caused me to, instead of staying in it because I love the competition, I was staying in it because I needed to support my kid, and I didn’t really feel same love for the art anymore,” he said. “I was just getting through it.”

Mac Danzig and Joe Lauzon

Danzig, the winner of four UFC fight-night bonuses, said things are hard for him financially these days. He’s had to sell most of his valuables just to make ends meet. He’s also had to, for the first time in his life, accept financial help from others.

“I’m certainly not set for life,” Danzig said. “I was broke going into my last fight, and then my last fight was just enough to cover the debt that I found myself in. One month after my last fight, I was having to find work. I’m not a material person. I’m very good with my money, and I’ve had to be because I haven’t made anything.”

In retirement, Danzig has become a coach, trainer and mentor to a handful of up-and-coming fighters. He said that training is not as lucrative as some would think. With no gym bearing his name and no mention of him as a trainer during UFC broadcasts, he’s working with fighters who are barely scraping by themselves.

“These guys can barely afford to be members of the gym, let alone pay me a percentage,” Danzig said. “Say I tell them, ‘Pay me 10 percent of your purse.’ That’s going to be like $50. I’m supposed to train a guy for eight weeks for $50?”

Yet that’s what he has been doing. Danzig said that’s mostly because he has the time to work with fighters while he figures out what the next stage in his life is going to be.

“It’s rough,” he said. “It’s not easy, and I still don’t know what I’m going to do.”

One possibility that Danzig hoped would come to fruition was a production job with the UFC. That dream was left unrealized.

“The UFC doesn’t owe me a job, but I kind of thought I had more to offer the organization since I’m not your average fighter – I can write, I’m a good photographer – and I thought I would be a good fit, but that’s not how it went down,” he said. “ I basically got handed off to a human resources person that didn’t really know anything about me and didn’t understand what I could bring to the table, and it was really off-putting.”

One thing that Danzig is hopeful about are the class-action lawsuits that have been filed against the UFC. Danzig recently became a plaintiff in one of the suits because “it just made sense.”

“We need to stand up and do it in a dignified manner, and the fighters need a voice,” he said. “I feel like this class action suit is the beginning of that. It’s not about, ‘F-ck the UFC.’ It’s about, ‘Let’s all get equal treatment.’ You can’t have an event without the fighters. You can be these amazing business people with this awesome production company and these awesome people who work hard and market it, but if you don’t have fighters, you don’t have anything.”

Danzig may sometimes come across as dour, but that’s far from reality. Sure, he’s struggling, but he’s struggled his entire life. And yes, he doesn’t know what his next step is going to be in life, but how many people truly do? What he does know is that he is proud of what he accomplished in MMA and that the time he spent fighting will ultimately serve him well.

“It was stressful,” Danzig said of his time in MMA. “It was arduous, and it was very emotionally and physically painful. I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish, and I don’t feel that sport owes me any more or any less. I was able to make something out of nothing, which not a lot of people get to do, and hopefully I’m going to be able to look back on that and use that as motivation for when I decide what I really want to tackle in the next chapter of my life.”

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