On July 5, at PFL 3 in Washington, DC, UFC veteran Eddie Gordon will debut in the PFL cage against Shamil Gamzatov. The pair will be looking to advance in the PFL’s inaugural middleweight season, and take one step closer to each division’s million-dollar prize.

When searching for a new home after his departure from the UFC, Gordon was obviously quite enticed by the possibility of a million-dollar payday in the PFL.

“It’s life-changing, man,” Gordon said on the latest episode of BJPENN.COM Radio. “People don’t realize it yet. It’s real now. I think now it’s starting to catch eyes, and people are starting to say, ‘Holy smokes, this thing is legit.’ It’s doing well, it’s catching a head of steam, and that’s what it’s about. It’s about creating competition. This is only gonna help every single fighter that’s on the UFC roster or Bellator roster, or One [Championship] roster, all of these different rosters. It’s gonna help everybody because now, there’s another dog in the yard that’s willing to pay fighters, and they want … You know, we’ve got some big names, man. We’ve got some big names that came over because it’s fights that are life-changing.”

The money isn’t the only reason Gordon signed with the PFL, however. He says having Ray Sefo, a former fighter, at the helm of the promotion made him feel as though he’d be taken care of. Sefo knows what it’s like to be a fighter, after all.

“I think that was one of the big things, talking to Ray,” Gordon explained. “When I was weighing out options of which promotion I was gonna fight with, what he said to me was, ‘Hey, I was a fighter. I’ve done K1. I fought two, three fights in a night. I know how hard it is. I know how much you go through mental, physical, emotional. We wanna make sure we take care of you guys.’ Him talking like that, and knowing that he lived it and he had our best interest in mind, was huge. So, that was a big part of it. You still see it, though, man. Doing the media stuff, and just doing anything, he’s passionate about it. He’s literally a kid in a candy store, so that’s a big part of it.”

How do you think Eddie Gordon will perform in this inaugural PFL season? Do you think he’ll earn the million-dollar payday?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 7/1/2018.