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By Ben Fowlkes

It’s a tough time to be Kalib Starnes. After a poor performance against Nate Quarry at UFC 83, Starnes has become persona non grata in the MMA world. His crime? When it came time to fight, he didn’t. He committed the unforgivable sin for a fighter. He ran.

Starnes spent all three rounds of his fight with Quarry circling the edge of the cage, doing everything he could to avoid engaging. When Quarry mocked him by high-stepping and flailing his arms near the end of the final round, the most offense Starnes could muster was an obscene gesture. Unfortunately for him, flipping the bird has never won a fight.

UFC president Dana White made no attempt to hide his displeasure with Starnes, telling reporters that Starnes would wake up the morning and “wish he’d fought a different fight.”

Starnes countered, saying, “Dana White wouldn’t cross the street for $10,000,” referring to the amount of his purse for the fight.

“For him to come out and make a statement like that as though I should be willing to suffer a brain injury while being paid less than $10,000 is beyond comment. How much is a brain injury worth anyway?” Starnes said in a statement sent to MMA Weekly.

The hell of it is, that’s a very rational way for Starnes to look at it. He felt he was injured and couldn’t win, so why should he get himself hurt if there’s not going to be any more money in it for him? As a line of reasoning, that makes sense. The only problem is, he’s in the fight business. Rational thought like that has no place here.

There’s a reason fighters – the good ones, anyway – get paid to go out and entertain us. It’s because most of us either can’t or won’t do it. It’s a hard job, and the risks are great. You might get seriously hurt, as Starnes points out. But my question is, didn’t he know about these risks when he signed the contract?

In one sense, I feel for Starnes here. He’s taking a lot of heat for not doing something, and he’s taking it mostly from a bunch of people who wouldn’t even dare try to do it. Just getting into the cage against a guy like Quarry takes guts, no doubt about it. But then again, that’s what he’s getting paid for. If he doesn’t think he’s getting paid enough, he’s free to seek other employment. If he thinks he’s getting paid enough, but only if he doesn’t have to risk injury, then he’s just in the wrong business.

When Starnes points out that Dana White, who has been very vocal in his criticism of the fight, would never take these kinds of risks for this kind of money, it is both an accurate and an unfair criticism. Would White get in there for ten grand? No way, and that’s why he doesn’t do it. He does the promoting, ostensibly because he does a better job of that than he does of fighting.

But Starnes, he’s a pro fighter. If there’s something he does better than fighting, by all means, he should go do it, especially now that he no longer has a job with the UFC. The mere act of putting on the gloves and getting into the Octagon to fight on a pay-per-view event is acknowledgment that he will be held to a different standard, and he should know that by now.

The truth is that fighting for a living isn’t for everyone. If more people could do it well, the pay scale would probably only get worse. The irony of Starnes’ situation is that, with his poor performance, he only justified the UFC’s decision not to pay him more. He may not think ten grand is worth risking injury, but there are plenty of guys in gyms all across America who would love that chance.

Good thing for them a spot has just opened up. Maybe Kalib can take over their job bouncing at that strip club. That is, if he thinks the risks aren’t too great.

Read more of Ben Fowlkes work at The Fighting Life.