Combat sports is a bizarre space by any reasonable metric.
People leather up and get paid to blast each other in the chops for the amusement of the general populace, and the one who does it better will often double his or her pay for winning.
They might even get a further bonus on top of that, if they provide adequate spectacle on the way to their success.
Needless to say when people who have chosen this enterprise as a career are met with choices and conflicts related to the amounts they're receiving in the noted contexts—or the means by which they'll collect those amounts—things can get a little unsteady.