Yoel Romero has not been inside the Octagon since he dropped a split decision to Robert Whittaker at UFC 225 in a bout for the middleweight title.
 
However, the 42-year-old earned a major victory this week when he was awarded a $27.45 million judgement in a lawsuit against Gold Star Performance Products, the company that supplied a tainted supplement that led to Romero failing a test with the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
 
The importance of clearing Romero’s name was not lost on his agent, Abe Kawa of First Round Management, who along with his team worked to ensure the supplement company was punished for their practices.

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TSN MMA Show - Episode 92

Aaron and Joe discuss the release of Elias Theodorou, Felicia Spencer's co-main event opportunity against Cris Cyborg, Bellator signing Robin van Roosmalen, a UFC Fight Night Stockholm preview and we are joined by First Round Management's Abe Kawa to discuss Yoel Romero being awarded $27.45 million in his lawsuit against a supplement company and by Calvin Kattar to discuss his upcoming bout with Ricardo Lamas at UFC 238 in Chicago.

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“We invested so much time and energy in making sure Yoel’s name was cleared, I’ll be honest with you it did take a lot out of us and him, more so him than us,” Kawa told the TSN MMA Show.  “Talking to sponsors, talking to people, even negotiating with the UFC, (they were saying) ‘we don’t know if he can stay clean.’  What? Hold on a second, the guy has been tested his whole life, so for it to be taken away from him just because a supplement company didn’t want to put what was in their products on the label, it’s a shame.”
 
While the money awarded in the judgment is a significant amount, there remains the possibility that Romero will not see the full total when everything is settled. It’s all a matter of what Kawa’s people find when they open Gold Star Performance Products’ financial records.
 
“We’re still going through the assets of the company and I’ll leave that to the attorneys, we have them there for a reason,” said Kawa. “We don’t know what we’re going to be getting from the company until we’ve done a full assessment of their assets.  So before I sit here and tell you that we’re going to make it all or not going to make any of it, the honest answer is until we get a true assessment, we really don’t know.”
 
Kawa says the news of the failed test really affected Romero in a negative way, which made getting him vindicated in court all the more special and much more important than the dollar amount attached to the case.
 
“I know it’s going to sound cliché, people aren’t going to believe me, I’m an agent that’s all about the money,” said Kawa.  “Yes I am all about the money, yes I do want to get paid, yes I do make a good living fighting for my guys, but I can honestly tell you, the courtroom was empty outside of us and the judge and whatnot and that man had to relive the day he found out the news, had to relive all the bashing, he had to relive all the sponsorship pulls, he had to relive all of that again and that man just broke down in a way that I’ve never seen, he really went down.”
 
The agent also believes that fighters should always fight back in situations where they have been wronged by companies such as Gold Star Performance Products because the damage that is done to their reputations never really goes away. He also thinks that if USADA’s rules as they presently exist had been in place in 2016 when Romero was flagged for the violation, he wouldn’t have been forced to serve a suspension in the first place.
 
“I don’t care what happens and all of this stuff is great, we cleared Yoel’s name, but at some point someone is going to say, ‘you’re still a cheater.’  You never get out of it,” said Kawa. “I wish the rules that we had today were in place for Yoel back then. I believe in this case, Yoel served a six-month suspension that he didn’t need to serve. If he had the ability to go to arbitration back then with the same rules that were applied today, I believe Yoel does not serve anything other than time served.”
 
The consequences of failing a test can go all the way to your contract negotiations as Kawa says this even came up there though, in his eyes, that’s fair play in business dealings.
 
“Fair warning to any UFC fighter, if you guys do anything, if you lose a fight they’re going to use it against you and they have that right,” said Kawa. “If you lose a fight and you look terrible, they will use it against you. So anything negative, they will use against you. That’s just a negotiation tactic, it’s normal.  It’s everyday business, that’s not a problem.”