Powerful, but a little misunderstood: UFC matchmakers Joe Silva and Sean Shelby

(NOTE: UFC matchmakers Joe Silva and Sean Shelby are featured in MMAjunkie.com’s commemorative yearbook, “The 25 Most Powerful People in MMA,” and are ranked No. 2. You can purchase the publication at usatoday.com or on newsstands nationwide. A condensed version of this story appears in today’s edition of USA TODAY.)

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At first I thought the UFC matchmakers were just being paranoid.

As soon as they showed up for their USA TODAY photo shoot in the bowels of Winnipeg’s MTS Centre before UFC 161 in June, Zuffa executives Joe Silva and Sean Shelby couldn’t stop joking – half-seriously, it seemed – about the possibility that this was all an elaborate setup.

After all, they don’t do interviews, much less photo shoots. The fact that we’d gotten the chance to talk to them on the record for our look at the most influential figures in the sport (available now in a special commemorative yearbook on newsstands and at usatoday.com) was a minor achievement in itself. The question on Silva and Shelby’s lips as they showed up to be photographed and interviewed was, “Are you sure this is legit?”

As I would learn during my hour-long conversation with the two, the paranoia wasn’t unfounded. Turns out that the last time someone told Shelby he had to have his photo taken was when Zuffa needed new ID badges for all employees in the Las Vegas office. So Shelby did his part, sat for his headshot, then went about his day.

Only later did he learn that there were no ID badges, that it was all a ruse set up by UFC President Dana White, who had planned to use Shelby’s photo for a “40-Year-Old Virgin”-themed billboard in Vegas. You know, as a prank. Which White was willing to spend $12,000 on, according to Shelby. It was only the legal team that stopped him. Apparently they thought it was the kind of prank that might get them sued, an assumption that seemed to hurt Shelby’s feelings just a little bit.

He can take a joke, he insisted. In this case, he was also glad that he didn’t have to.

‘The public, they think these guys are just chess pieces’

What intrigued me the most about the chance to interview the UFC matchmakers was the opportunity to learn how they work. They are quite possibly the most powerful and least understood people in all of MMA. They hire and fire UFC fighters, put together fight cards, scramble for injury replacements, and, as Shelby put it, act as “the camp counselors to, like, 400 grownup kids.”

And yet what do we know about them, about what they do and why they do it? On one hand, as Silva pointed out, staying out of the spotlight and away from interviews cuts down on the amount of public criticism they receive, or at least limits their ability to react to it. That’s probably a good thing. Because Silva? He loves to argue. Not in a mean way, mind you. More like an intellectually curious, captain-of-the-debate-team kind of way. He’d do it all day if you let him, so it might be a good thing that the UFC doesn’t let him.

The downside to that is that we – and here I mean media, myself included, as well as fans – don’t know nearly as much as we think we do about what Silva and Shelby are up to. But not knowing doesn’t stop us from assuming or criticizing or playing armchair matchmaker with what little information we do have. As Shelby put it at one point, “The public, they think these guys are just chess pieces. You move them however you want. And it’s not like that.”

He’s right about that. We do think that most of the time. I know I’ve wondered, sometimes even in print (or Internet print, if that’s a thing), why they made this match instead of that one. What was this guy doing on the main card? Who thought that guy had any business in the cage with this one?

A good recent example is the Chad Mendes-Cody McKenzie fight at UFC 148. You remember. Mendes steamrolled McKenzie in a bout that seemed so obviously lopsided in retrospect that even White wondered aloud at the post-fight press conference how it ever got made in the first place.

Shelby took the heat for that one. He’s the one responsible for all the UFC’s weight classes from 145 pounds on down, as well as the women’s bantamweight division.

The story with Shelby is, he started out working with small promotions such as the IFC in California, where his wife was a commentator, then helped promote an event in Hawaii called “Shogun,” which happened to be where Dana White first fell in love with the work of Robbie Lawler, whom he then signed to the UFC as a “Christmas present to myself,” according to Silva.

Eventually, Shelby got to know Silva, and after the two had talked shop often enough for Silva to see that he was “a sharp guy who could do this job,” Shelby was hired on as the matchmaker for the WEC after Zuffa bought the organization. When the bulk of the WEC roster was absorbed into the UFC, Shelby was too.

But handling the featherweight class proved to be a full-time job in itself at first, mostly because so many existing UFC lightweights wanted to move down in weight as soon as it was a viable option.

McKenzie was one such fighter. He went to Silva and told him he wanted to switch weight classes. Silva told him to talk to Shelby since, as Silva put it, “We don’t cross the streams.” The way the matchmakers see it, it’s important that one person knows exactly what’s happening in each division, and only that person is responsible for managing it. According to Silva, that’s a mistake other MMA organizations sometimes make.

“They’d have someone from their promotion call up a manager and say, ‘We’re interested in your guy, and here’s what we’re offering,’” Silva said. “Then two hours later a different guy from the same company calls offering more money. … People will sometimes try to go around Sean, because I’ve done this longer and am more of the known guy. But when they try to come to me, I tell them, ‘Look, it’s his world. You deal with him.’ For 145 [pounds] and down, I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

So when McKenzie wanted to come down, initially Shelby wasn’t sure he could use him. Then Bart Palaszewski pulled out of a fight with Mendes, and suddenly the situation changed.

“What people don’t understand is, it’s not like I could just remove Chad from the card and say, ‘Sorry, I can get you a fight four months from now,’” Shelby said. “We understand. You spent money on a camp. You’ve got bills to pay. We will do our best to find you a fight. I bend over backward to keep guys in fights, to keep the machine moving. You have to.”

That’s another part of the process that outsiders don’t always get, Silva and Shelby said. Fighters are promised a certain number of fights within a certain number of months. Keep them on the sidelines too long, and the UFC could be in breach of contract. Beyond that, they’d also risk turning the UFC into the kind of promotion they hate.

“You hear fighters [in other organizations] complain, ‘I haven’t fought in eight months, and they won’t return my calls,’” Silva said. “We don’t want to be like that, but to do that we have to keep a tight rein on how many people you have under contract.”

Ideally, the UFC would like to have most fighters stepping in the cage once every four months or so, for an average of three fights a year. Injuries only complicate the picture, especially when you’re trying to find a replacement to face one of the division’s top fighters, which was exactly the situation Shelby faced with Mendes.

“I can’t pull people out of other matches to fix this one,” Shelby said. “Then you’re just kicking the can down the road. But imagine trying to get someone to fight Chad Mendes on two weeks’ or even a month’s notice.”

Then Shelby’s phone rang. It was McKenzie.

“He called me, and I remember this very well, and he said, ‘I want to commit to 145 (pounds),’” Shelby recalled. “I told him I didn’t have any room, but I do have this one opening. I told him, ‘I don’t think you should take this fight, but…’”

You can imagine where it went from there. McKenzie’s a fighter, after all. He jumped on the opening, all but pleading with Shelby to give him the fight. Shelby was reluctant at first, he said, but, “I had nobody.”

“I mean, nobody,” he said. “It’s not like I can sign some random guy. I’ve already got all the top 10 in the world [at 145 pounds]. I had no other choices.”

And so the fight got made, McKenzie got dropped with a body shot, and Shelby got the blame. That’s how it goes when you’re a matchmaker. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone’s an expert. They’ll all say they knew exactly how it was going to go down and you’d have to be an idiot to make that fight in the first place.

But that’s after. Before the fight, there’s a lot more guesswork involved. The matchmakers know that just from their own experiences.

“The thing is, there’s so many different combinations of styles and martial arts, you really don’t know,” Silva said. “Some fights you think will be boring, they turn out to be ‘Fight of the Night.’ Some fights you think will be good turn out to be boring. Our thing is, are we creating legitimate contenders?”

And that, in a nutshell, is how they view their role in the UFC. As Shelby put it, the job of the matchmakers is “to bring challengers to the champion.” That, and to monitor the frustrating math problem that comes with a constantly changing 400-fighter roster.

The worst part of the job

Nobody, with the possible exception of corporate sociopaths, likes firing people. Silva and Shelby are no different. If you ask them, they’ll say it’s by far their least favorite part about their jobs, and they have to do it frequently.

“That’s the worst,” Silva said. “It’s the absolute worst. I’ve almost quit this job multiple times because of that. People have broken down and cried.”

“It never gets easier,” Shelby added. “We realize that these are human beings with wives, kids, and this is their dream. It’s a dream to become the best in the world at something. … It’s not like looking for someone to come in and work for some company and just be average. We’re not looking for that. We’re looking for the single best person on the planet in their respective weight class. You’re obligated to cycle through in search of that person, to find these challengers.”

Cutting people in the UFC is especially unpleasant, because while the matchmakers usually inform fighters of the decision through their managers, some fighters represent themselves. Others they see on a regular basis, either when that fighter shows up at an event next week to corner his training partner, or sometimes just in their personal lives. Shelby said he still regards Fredson Paixao, whom he trains jiu-jitsu with, as one of his best friends. Still, when the time came to cut him from the UFC, he had to pull the trigger.

“I read an interview recently with a fighter talking about the depression that comes on after being cut,” Silva said. “It’s impossible to read that and not feel responsible, but the job dictates it. It’s not like we decided, this would be fun. It’s that this is the only way it can work. Nobody new can come in until somebody old goes. If you’re tired of seeing rematches, then you’ve got to clear space and bring in new people.”

The reason it has to work this way is, as Silva put it, “a simple math problem.” The math is the part that Shelby and Silva are always arguing with White about. When White declares that every member of a certain “Ultimate Fighter” cast will get a contract, for instance, or when he buys out a rival like Strikeforce, it’s the matchmakers who have to figure out how to deal with the influx of fighters.

“Dana’s Captain Kirk, and we’re Scotty,” Silva said. “Dana’s always asking for crazy, impossible stuff, and we’re going, ‘Captain, we can’t go any faster!’ He’s the one saying, ‘Dammit Scotty, make it happen!’”

Silva’s something of a special relic in the UFC. He’s one of the few employees who worked for the company back when it was owned by SEG, before Zuffa bought it in 2001. Before that, he was a manager for a software retailer, but really, he said, “I didn’t care what I did as long as I could do martial arts and hang out with my friends.”

He loved the first UFC but saw problems on the horizon. When SEG took out an ad in “Black Belt Magazine” that included the office phone number, he called it just hoping to share what he thought was good advice.

“I didn’t think I’d get a job out of it or anything,” Silva said. “I just said, ‘Hey, I love this [stuff], but here’s the problems you’re going to have.’”

And they listened to him. Silva became a kind of an unofficial advisor, then an official employee. The problem was, SEG didn’t pay very well. He went into debt just from holding onto the job. When Zuffa bought the company, Silva was one of the few employees who came highly recommended to the new owners. They wanted him to relocate to Vegas, which he did for a short time.

“I hated it there,” Silva said. “But I thought, this is my chance to get out of debt.”

The thin line between mean and honest

The thing a lot of fans know about Silva – or think they do, anyway – is that he’s, in the words of White “a mean little f—er.” That just happens to be Silva’s least favorite description, which might be why White loves to needle him with it.

“I really don’t consider myself a mean person at all, but I am very honest,” Silva said. “I won’t lie, and I put things very straight. And fighters, they have a lot of buffers around them, sort of ‘atta boy’ guys. They’re not used to someone telling them, ‘No, this is how it is.’”

That’s especially true when it comes to contract renegotiations and bout offers. Fighters, like most people, aren’t terribly fond of having a dollar value put on their worth. They also don’t always like Silva’s ideas for whom they should face next. When they hear his no-nonsense explanation, which some managers say can be Vulcan-like in its unvarnished appeal to cold, hard reason, some might understandably come away feeling like he’s a little bit of jerk.

But then, as Silva sees it, that’s kind of the way it has to be when you’re offering one person a chance to make money fighting someone else in a cage.

“If everybody only took fights that they thought they had a really good chance of winning, nobody would ever fight,” Silva said. “When you look at the odds, they almost always favor someone, even if they end up being wrong. But if you’re in the UFC, you’re here to fight who I have. If you’re going, ‘I don’t think I can beat that guy,’ then maybe you should be doing something else.”

If you want to know who really feels Silva’s wrath, talk to the managers. They’re the ones most likely to get verbally eviscerated for trying to overstate their pull with the UFC when wooing prospective clients, and they’re also the ones most likely to take the heat for late-notice injury withdrawals, which are a constant issue in the UFC.

According to Silva, injuries are “irritating,” but he tries not to voice his irritation to the fighters themselves because, “If you’re an a–hole about it, they will take it as you pressuring them to fight, and if someone got injured that way, that would be a very bad thing.”

“You cannot find a single fighter ever in UFC history who will say that they told me they were injured and I gave them s— about it,” Silva said. “Not ever. … The only time I’ve ever yelled, and I have done this, but you’d be shocked how many times I get a call where they say, ‘Hey, sorry, but he’s got to pull out of the fight. Two weeks ago he really messed up his knee.’ It’s like, really? Two weeks ago? Why didn’t you tell me then? I wouldn’t have pulled him from the fight, but I could have started thinking about a replacement. It’s always, ‘Oh, but we thought he’d be OK.’ You thought wrong. And you thinking wrong screwed the show, screwed me, screwed his opponent. Don’t think. If he’s got a hangnail, just let me know.”

Solving problems, one phone call at a time

These are the things people don’t think about when they talk wistfully about the so-called dream job that Silva and Shelby have. That, and also the long hours. Listening to both of them describe recent “vacations” they took is essentially like listening to two men describe a time when they got on a plane to go work in a different city for a little while.

Shelby went to Italy recently, he said. While his wife and daughter slept, “I was in the bathroom of the hotel on my computer on Skype every night from about midnight to 5 a.m.”

Silva went down to Key West, Fla., with his wife for their anniversary. It just so happened that the night of their actual anniversary, there was a UFC event in Brazil. While he was glued to a screen, his wife went to dinner with friends.

That’s because this job? It never stops. Neither does the criticism. Especially when they have to fill gaps left by injuries, fans don’t always realize what a scramble it is just to keep a card together.

“It’s amazing the number of phone calls we go through when we’re trying to solve a problem,” Shelby said. “It’s not like someone drops out and I call one guy and say, ‘You want this?’ And then it’s problem solved.”

“How many matches do we want to make that never get made, just because of timing?” Silva chimed in. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like, this guy has to fight on this show because his contract is up, and this would be the perfect fight for him, but the other guy has something else going on. People want to know why we wouldn’t make a certain fight? We probably tried to, but couldn’t. It just didn’t work out. That happens all the time.”

When they go searching for a replacement, Shelby said, “On average you get down to about your third pick.”

With bouts lined up months in advance to accommodate advertising and training schedules, when one piece falls out, it can throw off plans for the entire division. Then the matchmakers are on the phone, trying to find a taker.

“If the guy agrees to it, you’re a genius and life is good,” Silva said. “If they don’t, what are you going to do? We’ve made the matches and done our jobs, but if someone gets injured it doesn’t matter. Fix it. Now you’re desperate.”

But despite the headaches and the stress that come with being a UFC matchmaker, the passion these two have for their jobs is palpable. Both are lifelong martial artists, and both seem like men who would rather talk about fighting than anything else.

That makes it easy to see why Silva was willing to go into debt just to keep his job, while Shelby was content working for minor regional organizations back when “you had a small promotion and everybody would fight their asses off and then go party in the parking lot of the motel.”

Now they might spend their days scrambling to fix one problem after another, but at least they’re doing it in the biggest MMA organization on the planet. At least when they’re being hounded to make the ship go farther, faster, it’s the top ship in the fleet that they’re pushing to its limits.

“And we’re good at that,” Silva said. “We make it happen, but a lot of times it’s just barely.”

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie.com’s lead features writer and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @benfowlkesMMA.