Daniel Cormier took a pay cut to fight at UFC 200

When Jon Jones was pulled from UFC 200 with just two days to go until his main event scrap with Daniel Cormier, there was much speculation as to what would happen to Daniel Cormier in regards to his involvement in the historic card.

Fortunately, former UFC middleweight kingpin Anderson Silva stepped in on just two days notice to fight Cormier in a 3 round main-card fight. While Cormier was criticized for what many perceived to be ‘playing it safe’, the light heavyweight champ revealed on The MMA Hour this week that he actually went as far as to take a pay cut for the fight because of his desire to fight:

“I wanted to fight, man. This is the thing … I did it because, honestly man, as long as we’re okay, we’re good with our money. We make a ton of money, you know, and my contract is different. So it went from being a title fight to a non-title fight, my contract states a lot of different things in it, so I took less money to fight. You know, I wanted to fight.

“I didn’t lose my pay-per-view and everything, so I still get my points and everything and I’ll be fine. I don’t waste money. I just keep my money, man, so it’s fine. I don’t like to say stuff like, ‘well what’s a million dollars here, $500,000 dollars here?’ That sounds silly. But it’s like, we’re fine. I could make the money that I made last weekend and it would last 10 years if I needed to.”