The morning of June 11, a Klaxon alert told me that Tommy Langaker’s name had just dropped off the list of competitors at ADCC, the world’s most prestigious submission grappling tournament.

In this weird, niche sport that I obsess over, this was an early warning sign, a rumble before an avalanche. Athletes who’d spent years trying to reach ADCC were jumping to a rival tournament, the Craig Jones Invitational.

Submission grappling, as a professional sport, is younger than most of its competitors, and some of them are teenagers. There is no unified ruleset or governing body. Full-time athletes regularly enter tournaments alongside part-time hobbyists.

For fans of the sport, the peak of the competition calendar is the Abu Dhabi Combat Club championship, or ADCC, a tournament founded by Sheik Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the son of UAE’s first president and now its national security advisor and brother of the current president.

Held every other year, ADCC is often called “the Olympics of submission grappling,” though few outside the sport even know it exists. It is like the Olympics in one way: the winners earn more in fanfare and prestige than cash, even as participating athletes have become ever more professionalized.

The sport itself can look like wrestling, except you win by making your opponent submit using a joint lock or stranglehold. Since a pin doesn’t end the fight, it’s normal for grapplers to fight from the bottom, working to off balance the top player or entangle limbs. Levi Jones-Leary, who ultimately finished second at CJI, started every match by sitting down in front of his opponent.

No grappler is making a living off prize money, because most tournaments offer little to no prize money. Those who treat it like a job hustle for sponsorships and teach seminars and sell instructional videos.

One of those athletes, two-time ADCC silver medalist Craig Jones, raised several million dollars from unnamed funders to challenge ADCC’s dominance. He scheduled a rival tournament – the Craig Jones Invitational – for the same weekend as this year’s tournament, offering a million-dollar prize to the winner.

With the two organizers fighting over the same competitors, I set up a Klaxon alert on each tournament’s roster.

And in June, it happened. “Has Tommy Langaker said anything about CJI?” I posted in a Discord group for grappling fans. “His name just dropped off the ADCC list.” I found Langaker’s sudden absence surprising, since he had won ADCC’s European trials, a grueling competition in itself, to qualify for this year’s championship.

It took three more days for Langaker to formally announce he was dropping out of ADCC to compete at CJI, Jones’ competing event. Other athletes followed, and Klaxon emailed me each time, as the two tournaments jostled for the best athletes in the sport.

I spent most of the summer obsessing over the fight between these two tournaments and their organizers, and in doing so, I leaned on some of MuckRock’s core tools: FOIA requests, DocumentCloud and Klaxon.

What does it cost to run the biggest submission grappling events in the world?

Jones and Jassim spent the spring and summer sniping at each other over social media, but at the heart of the dispute was money: What does it cost to run the biggest submission grappling events in the world?

ADCC’s main organizer, Mo Jassim, spent lavishly on 2022’s world championship to turn the tournament into a premier spectacle. The UFC’s Bruce Buffer announced fights and taiko drummers played between bouts. When Jassim changed the venue to T-Mobile Arena in 2024, it raised the cost even more.

Many athletes who were competing at ADCC asked why money was going to a venue and not to them, given the brewing controversy around underpaid fighters. Several competitors, including 2022 champion Ffion Davies, said they could make more money in other events, and that doing a tournament just for exposure and prestige wasn’t worth it.

Jassim’s original venue, the Thomas & Mack Center, is part of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and therefore subject to Nevada’s public records laws. And because Jones thought it would be a good troll to hold his event at the same venue as the last ADCC, we can see what both promotions spent in the same place.

I filed three public records requests with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas:

• May 29: the booking contract for CJI

• June 20: contracts and ticket sales for ADCC 2022

• Sept. 9: final sales and contract amendments for CJI

To be honest, I didn’t think UNLV would give me any of this. Events are a big business and I expected the university to find an excuse or an exemption to keep sales figures private. To its credit, UNLV fulfilled each of these requests in about a week, with no redactions.

Did CJI earn enough in ticket sales to cover its huge prizes?

Besides poaching competitors, CJI made waves for its massive prize pool:

• $1 million to each of the two divisions’ winners (Nick Rodriguez and Kade Ruotolo)

• $20,000 for best submission (Lucas Kanard)

• $50,000 for most exciting grappler (Andrew Tackett)

• $10,001 show money for 16 competitors

• Unknown show/prize money for the superfight between Ffion Davies and Mackenzie Dern

• Unknown show money for Gabi Garcia

Jones told podcaster Joe Rogan that a mystery funder was covering costs entirely, and ticket sales would go to charity. The CJI organizers have not released sponsorship figures or ad revenue, which was streamed live on YouTube for free.

So, did its ticket sales equal its prizes? No. But it did net slightly more than ADCC did in 2022.

CJI sold a total of 6,823 tickets. That earned about $864,512 in gross revenue. The Thomas & Mack Center kept $254,952 to cover costs, including what CJI had prepaid, eventually paying out $674,560 to Jones’ organization, the Fair Fight Foundation.

In 2022, its most recent event, ADCC sold 10,238 tickets, earning $1,099,980 in gross revenue.

Across almost all venue categories, ADCC spent more than CJI, despite paying less in rent. It spent $352,823 on services provided by Thomas & Mack, almost $100,000 more than CJI.

ADCC’s total prize pool in 2022 was $230,600, according to its website. The highest payouts went to the winners of the open weight division and superfight – Yuri Simões and Gordon Ryan, respectively. Men’s division winners earned $10,000; women earned $6,000.

Two months after ADCC, Jassim resigned as head organizer for the tournament. Jones has promised to host CJI again. On Dec. 7, he announced on Instagram that he’d secured funding for a tournament in August 2025.

One person who likely out-earned every athlete at ADCC 2022 only briefly set foot on the mats: Bruce Buffer charges from $40,000 to $74,999 for his role as a ring announcer.

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The tweets started trickling out in late November. One might fairly describe them as disgruntled.

Bellator bantamweight champion Patchy Mix called it “frustrating” to have two straight fights canceled. Light heavyweight champion Corey Anderson wrote that he was “aging like warm cheese” waiting for his next fight to be booked. Featherweight champion Patricio Pitbull said he’d waited most of the year for a fight, then spent money on a training camp when he was finally given a date and an opponent, only to end up having the fight called off a month prior.

“We have no clue about when we might be fighting after two fight cancellations in a row,” Bellator bantamweight contender Leandro Higo wrote on X. “Time is of the essence in this game, we can’t waste our primes on the sidelines. I’m working hard to take that title, spending money, sweat and blood. What’s going on?”

This is the question many fighters on the Bellator roster are asking lately — and no answers seem to be forthcoming. After PFL bought Bellator from Paramount Global in November of 2023, company executives outlined plans to keep Bellator going as a separate, “reimagined” entity in 2024.

But as the year draws to a close, many Bellator fighters have taken to social media to complain of being shelved with little to no information on the company’s future plans for them. They remain under contract, unable to sign with another promotion like the UFC, but say they aren’t being offered fights.

Duke Roufus, the longtime coach of former Bellator bantamweight champion Sergio Pettis, was one of the first to take his complaints public.

“Sergio was supposed to fight on the [Nov. 29] card in Saudi Arabia, and the fight was pulled off the card,” Roufus said. “Word around the campfire was that it was because of finances, and that’s never a good thing to hear in this business. People say they’re waiting for an influx of money to come in, but a lot of these guys are at critical points in their careers. They don’t have time to waste on the bureaucracy of organization wars.”

Publicly, PFL executives have stayed mostly quiet on the subject. PFL officials did not reply to repeated requests for comment for this story. On X, where PFL chairman Donn Davis is an active poster, replies to virtually every tweet he sends are littered with fans asking about the status of Bellator fighters or demanding they be released from their contracts. Still, there’s been no public reply from anyone at PFL to lend clarity to the situation.

Some fighters say they were granted permission to fight in Japan’s Rizin organization while still under contract with Bellator. That was the case for bantamweight Juan Archuleta, who won the Rizin bantamweight title before later losing it to Kai Asakura last December. He was then released from his Bellator contract, Archuleta said, which allowed him to continue in Rizin. Some other fighters were given similar opportunities, he noted, but that came with a pay cut from what they’d been making in Bellator prior to the PFL sale.

“Before the sale, Mike Kogan and Scott Coker had bumped all our purses up,” Archuleta said. “They re-signed us and gave us a s*** ton of money for our contracts. Like, a s*** ton. And we were all like, this would be nice if they still honor it, but I already knew going into that change of [ownership] that [PFL wasn't] going to want to honor those contracts. It’s a lot of money for some guys.”

This appears to be at the heart of former Bellator champion Gegard Mousasi’s lawsuit against the company filed in October. Mousasi alleges that after signing an eight-fight contract extension with built-in escalators set to take effect in the second half of the deal, Bellator essentially stopped offering him fights.

Mousasi was released from his contract in May after voicing his discontent publicly in several interviews on the subject. Now he is seeking damages of at least $15 million, alleging not only breach of contract but also accusing Bellator and PFL of misclassifying him as an independent contractor.

MMA history has seen several instances of one promotion buying another, only to then experience some sticker shock at the price of some of the existing contracts. But as Roufus pointed out, despite the many complaints about fighter pay in the UFC, there were no such complaints about a refusal to honor contracts after the UFC purchased rivals like PRIDE FC and Strikeforce.

“You see this all the time with companies that come out and say they’re going to be the alternative to the UFC and they’re going to treat the fighters better,” Roufus said. “But I’ll say this: Next year will be my 20th year coaching fighters in the UFC. I’ve worked with elite guys to entry-level guys, and I’ve never seen the UFC renege on a contract or not pay a guy what he was owed or just shelve a guy like this. They always do what they say they’re going to do, and they usually do extra.”

Speaking to reporters after UFC 310 earlier this month, UFC CEO Dana White expressed sympathy with those fighters voicing their frustrations about the lack of bout offers.

“The last couple months we’ve been talking a lot about the PFL,” White said. “They’re canceling a lot of shows. I know a lot of guys that are supposed to fight, aren’t fighting. You guys know what the f*** is going on. When you see that start to happen, you’re running out of money. Things aren’t looking good, and you’re going to have people that want to jump ship.”

For now, those who might like to jump are instead being held in limbo. The wait for fights — and answers — goes on.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — In the remotest reaches of Alaska, there’s no relying on DoorDash to have Thanksgiving dinner — or any dinner — delivered. But some residents living well off the grid nevertheless have turkeys this holiday, thanks to the Alaska Turkey Bomb.

For the third straight year, a resident named Esther Keim has been flying low and slow in a small plane over rural parts of south-central Alaska, dropping frozen turkeys to those who can’t simply run out to the grocery store.

Alaska is mostly wilderness, with only about 20% of it accessible by road. In winter, many who live in remote areas rely on small planes or snowmobiles to travel any distance, and frozen rivers can act as makeshift roads.

When Keim was growing up on an Alaska homestead, a family friend would airdrop turkeys to her family and others nearby for the holidays. Other times, the pilot would deliver newspapers, sometimes with a pack of gum inside for Keim.

Her family moved to more urban Alaska nearly 25 years ago but still has the homestead. Using a small plane she had rebuilt with her father, Keim launched her turkey delivery mission a few years back after learning of a family living off the land nearby who had little for Thanksgiving dinner.

“They were telling me that a squirrel for dinner did not split very far between three people,” Keim recalled. “At that moment, I thought ... ‘I’m going to airdrop them a turkey.’”

She decided not to stop there. Her effort has grown by word of mouth and by social media posts. This year, she’s delivering 32 frozen turkeys to people living year-round in cabins where there are no roads.

All but two had been delivered by Tuesday, with delivery plans for the last two birds thwarted by Alaska’s unpredictable weather.

Among the beneficiaries are Dave and Christina Luce, who live on the Yentna River about 45 miles (72 kilometers) northwest of Anchorage. They have stunning mountain views in every direction, including North America’s tallest mountain, Denali, directly to the north. But in the winter it’s a 90-minute snowmobile ride to the nearest town, which they do about once a month.

“I’m 80 years old now, so we make fewer and fewer trips,” Dave Luce said. “The adventure has sort of gone out of it.”

They’ve known Keim since she was little. The 12-pound (5.44-kilogram) turkey she delivered will provide more than enough for them and a few neighbors.

“It makes a great Thanksgiving,” Dave Luce said. “She’s been a real sweetheart, and she’s been a real good friend.”

Keim makes 30 to 40 turkey deliveries yearly, flying as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) from her base north of Anchorage toward Denali’s foothills.

Sometimes she enlists the help of a “turkey dropper” to ride along and toss the birds out. Other times, she’s the one dropping turkeys while her friend Heidi Hastings pilots her own plane.

Keim buys about 20 turkeys at a time, with the help of donations, usually by people reaching out to her through Facebook. She wraps them in plastic garbage bags and lets them sit in the bed of her pickup until she can arrange a flight.

“Luckily it’s cold in Alaska, so I don’t have to worry about freezers,” she said.

She contacts families on social media to let them know of impending deliveries, and then they buzz the house so the homeowners will come outside.

“We won’t drop the turkey until we see them come out of the house or the cabin, because if they don’t see it fall, they’re not going to know where to look,” she said.

It can be especially difficult to find the turkey if there’s deep snow. A turkey was once missing for five days before it was found, but the only casualty so far has been a lost ham, Keim said.

Keim prefers to drop the turkey on a frozen lake if possible so it’s easy to locate.

“As far as precision and hitting our target, I am definitely not the best aim,” she joked. “I’ve gotten better, but I have never hit a house, a building, person or dog.”

Her reward is the great responses she gets from families, some who record her dropping the turkeys and send her videos and texts of appreciation.

“They just think it’s so awesome that we throw these things out of the plane,” Keim said.

Ultimately, she hopes to set up a nonprofit organization to solicit more donations and reach people across a bigger swath of the state. And it doesn’t have to stop at turkeys.

“There’s so many kids out in the villages,” she said. “It would be cool to maybe add a stuffed animal or something they can hold.”

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Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska.