Pierce's job continues to be to keep things running smoothly so Shamus can search for the next big thing. "Gareb has hundreds of ideas," says Pierce. "One day our CFO said to him, 'Gareb, you have a lot of good ideas, but they're not all good. So let's pick two a year that we are going to go after.' " That's what they do now.
In the early '90s, shamus passed on an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the Pokémon craze because he didn't want to put his cash-cow magazines at risk.
Back in the early '90s, the idea Shamus really wanted to pursue was Pokémon. "When Pokémon came to the U.S.," he says, "I knew clear as day it was going to be huge. It had all the attributes of something that could be successful here, and it was already a monster hit in Japan. It had the breadth and depth of a property that was already a proven success, yet you could ask a hundred people here in the U.S. and a hundred had never heard of it." Shamus had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor by manufacturing licensed products for the mass market retail industry--Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us--but back then he had fewer resources. "It was much larger than anything we had done," he says. "At the time I just had the three magazines and didn't have the conventions and the leverage and connections I have now. It was going to take a lot of dollars, and it would have risked a lot of what we do. It wasn't worth risking everything, but I knew the reward would be there." Ultimately, he decided to pass.
Like Pokémon, mixed martial arts fighting is hugely popular in Japan, where enormous arenas routinely sell out. Once again, Shamus feels he is ahead of the pop culture curve with a proven product that has great potential, and this time he is not going to let the opportunity pass.
Why Don't You Do It?
If comic book guy Shamus is an unlikely sports mogul, his partner is even more unlikely: Kurt Otto is an architectural designer who lives one town over from Shamus in New Jersey. They met through mutual friends and, oddly enough, later realized that Otto had done the redesign of Shamus's house. Just as Shamus leaves the running of Wizard Entertainment to Pierce, he had entrusted the home project to his wife.
It turned out that both men were avid golfers, but while Shamus and his brothers had spent their childhoods with comic books, Otto and his brothers spent theirs studying tae kwon do. Otto, a second-degree black belt who also wrestled competitively in high school, has been involved in martial arts as a teacher and student. "My brothers and I are huge MMA fans," he says, "and we have the cable bills to prove it." When he found out what Shamus did, Otto suggested that he launch a magazine to cover MMA--and he took Shamus to that first fight in Atlantic City.
Intrigued, Shamus studied the marketplace, looking at the existing websites and publications, and it was déjà vu: "It was almost exactly what I saw when I looked at comic books back in 1990. A few black-and-white publications. No one was really addressing what was going on in the marketplace, how it was changing." But the more he continued his research, scrutinizing attendance and pay-per-view ratings, the more he saw potential for something beyond just a magazine. He began to think he and Otto should promote the fights themselves.
It was Otto, a martial artist concerned about the fighters, who came up with the league concept. "I watched this documentary on HBO that followed two heavyweights who fought in the UFC," says Otto, who will serve as the league's first commissioner, "and it really showed the trials and tribulations of the fighter's life. There is no organization to the sport, no foundation for retirement. That's when I had the idea to do some kind of league. I thought, 'Let's provide health insurance, salaries, let these guys train and get involved with the sport as professional athletes, not as guys with a day job who fight part-time.' "
Shamus and Otto continued to brainstorm the IFL concept, which they hoped would set them apart from the competition. The pair capitalized on Otto's connections and started networking within the fight world, trying to discern interest among fighters, trainers, and promoters for an MMA league. They met with Japanese legend Kanji Inoki, a champion wrestler who fought, among others, Muhammad Ali in 1976 (to a draw) and defeated world champion heavyweights from kick boxing, Thai boxing, and regular boxing. A cultural icon in his homeland, Inoki loved the idea and started making further introductions. Things started moving fast, even for seat-of-the-pants businessman Shamus: "Before we knew it, a lot of the top guys in the MMA world really loved what we had come up with. It was incredible, because we were talking about it theoretically, and all of a sudden, everyone was like, 'Hey, why don't you do it?' " So they did.
Real-Life Superheroes
Unlike most major professional sports leagues, the teams do not have separate owners. They are all owned by the IFL, which means they are all owned by Shamus and Otto, who are the league's majority owners. Shamus declines to say how much of his own cash he has invested, but he does say it's "substantial"--although he's following his two rules about new ventures. The amount is not so substantial that a failure would jeopardize Wizard, and he's going to keep an eye on those metrics (even if he won't identify them publicly).
