Originally posted by Aristotle
The big hurdle is deciding that money means more to you than your physical well being. All boxers and MMA fighters clearly choose the money. Once you've already gotten over that hurdle, taking drugs is nothing.
Of sorts, the problem with this is that a lot of the guys in UFC doesn't get paid much in the way of professional fighters UNLESS they're a big name... for example with the last card... Sherk got paid $30k for a TITLE fight where he is the champ. I forget what Franca supposidly got paid, but it wasn't that much. Tito Ortiz (a big name) got paid over 8 times the ammount his opponent Reshad Evans got paid for the fight (which ended in a draw).

So imagine if Mayweather actually agreed to fight Sherk... you'd have Mayweather getting paid $2 million up front (out of Dana's pocket), plus probably some by the UFC for the fight (a couple hundred thousand?), plus a cut of the PPV/Ticket sales (that's where bigtime boxers make a lot of their money)... versus Sherk getting paid ~$30k.

As for Dana's grandstanding about performance enhancing drugs... before he was president of UFC, he was a manager... and he managed at least two of the biggest names in the UFC in Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. So I doubt he's naive about what goes on behind the scenes. But I guess it comes down to where you draw the line as what's a "performance enhancing" drug. I know a lot of people who use like protein drinks and whatnot after training because they're trying to build muscle. Which could most certainly be considered "performance enhancing" but is entirely legal. However it's also a far cry from injecting yourself with an anabolic steroid.