After 'waste of time' in talks, Eddie Alvarez hopes for resolution with Bellator

Eddie Alvarez (24-3) said he is waiting for his next court date and looking for a house in Boca Raton, Fla., as his legal battle with Bellator MMA plays out. 

After several months of silence, the 29-year-old fighter called in to MMAjunkie.com Radio (www.mmajunkie.com/radio) on Tuesday to say he isn’t giving up his fight to either free himself from the tournament-based promotion, or strike a deal he believes is fair.

“I’m asking them to do what they said they were going to do,” he said. “You’re going to pay me what the other company was willing to pay, or you’re just going to step back and say, ‘Hey, go on your way, we don’t have the means to give you that opportunity.’

“We need to try to come to a resolution that would not make me happy or them happy, but maybe we can get to something that we can both walk out and say, ‘OK, we’re not totally happy, but we’ll get through this and be able to move on.’”

The two sides have been stuck since settlement talks broke down earlier this year. Although Alvarez declined to offer specifics about several meetings with Bellator, citing a confidentiality agreement, he said he offered “a very great deal” to resolve the legal impasse and re-sign with the promotion.

“If you add up core costs, they were getting a steal,” he said. “It was nowhere close to what I would have gotten in the UFC. Nowhere even close. I was being very fair.”

Alvarez said he and Bellator had different ideas of what was fair, however. 

“We were so far away from each other that it actually was a waste of time for myself,” he said.

Now, it appears the courts will decide who acted in good faith when Alvarez became a limited free agent this past October. Alvarez and Bellator disagree on whether the promotion matched a competing offer from UFC parent company Zuffa, and filed dueling lawsuits in January in federal court.

Alvarez believes Bellator changed the language of his original contract to avoid matching Zuffa’s offer. Specifically, he said a clause was altered in an addendum he signed that waived an exclusive renegotiation period and allowed him to negotiate solely with Zuffa. 

“My original contract stated that they need to match all terms of any other contract that I was offered after I was released,” he said. “And in the early release, they changed the wording. They changed ‘all material terms’ to ‘material terms,’ which from what I’m told – and I’m not an attorney, but … there is a significant difference.”

However, MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) could find no change in the addendum, which was included in Bellator’s lawsuit against Alvarez. When asked whether he could prove the document was altered, Alvarez offered to post his contract on Twitter. Follow-up calls and texts to the fighter and his legal reps were not returned.

Both sides have encountered setbacks in the courtroom. An injunction that would have allowed Alvarez to fight at UFC 159 was struck down by a federal judge, and a motion by Bellator to dismiss portions of the fighter’s lawsuit also failed. 

The former Bellator champ, whose manager, Glenn Robinson, owns the JACO Hybrid Training Center in Boca Raton, recently renovated an investment home in his longtime hometown of Philadelphia and plans to sell it while the case enters its discovery period.

Alvarez said a recent tweet about fighting in unsanctioned competitions to make a few extra bucks was a joke. 

“I came from a street fighting background,” he said. “I’m not going back there.”

But he indicated he might have a breaking point if the case continued to drag on. 

“It hurts to say this, because I don’t want to let the fans down, but if there comes a point where I’m foreclosing on my property, and I’ve got to tell my kids, I’m going to put my head down, put my gloves on and go to work and keep my mouth shut,” he said. 

The fighter said he could still make a living with construction work and personal training. But he isn’t throwing in the towel just yet, and he said other MMA promotions could even join the fray. 

“If an organization was willing to do so, and of course, they would probably get subpoenaed and added to the court case – if they’re willing to do so, I could fight for someone right now if they were willing to take that risk,” Alvarez said. “And from what I hear, there’s no way Bellator would win an injunction. They can’t stop me. I could be wrong, but this is some advice that I was given.

“Maybe at the end of this, maybe I made a big mistake. But I’m following my heart and I’m doing what I feel is right. I know there was wrong done, I know the company’s lying, I know they’re doing things that aren’t just, and whether a judge sees it or not, the public sees it, I see it, and that’s good enough for me.”

For more on Bellator’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of the site.

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