News and Features
Top Dog
By Gary Stephen Ross published Nov 1, 2007
Neatly skirting the U.S. Justice Department, Calvin Ayre has built an online empire out of music, gaming, and mixed martial arts
This night, the Coliseum is on the Squamish First Nations reserve, just off the Lion's Gate Bridge in North Vancouver. Joe Mathias Hall has been turned into a television studio; in the centre is a klieg-lit combat ring. The gladiators have come from as far afield as Japan, Russia, Brazil, and Mexico, adrenaline-jazzed warriors with blurred ears and ripped bodies. The Romans, who've passed through tight security, are big on black clothing, shaved heads, muscles, implants, and tattoos.
The emperor, seated amid a knot of bodacious young women, is Calvin Ayre, 46, founder and chairman of the digital entertainment company Bodog. He's wearing black cowboy boots and blue jeans. His hair is jet black. On his right thumb is a silver ring; a chunky silver chain nestles in the salt-and-pepper hair sprouting from his open-necked grey shirt (the logo DANGEROUS appears prominently across the back). Over the past decade, riding the macho wave that gave us Maxim magazine and Spike TV, Ayre has built Bodog into a moneyspinner that last year landed him on the cover of Forbes. Is he a billionaire, as the magazine proclaimed? "Depends what multiple you put on the company," he replies. "Two years ago revenues were $200-million. Last year they hit $300-million." He's coy about the bottom line, but industry analysts put Bodog's profit margin in the area of 25 percent. "Of all the stuff we do," he adds, intent on the violence in the ring, "this is what I like best. Watch the guy in the red corner-he submits everybody."
The stuff Bodog does, besides mixed martial arts, includes digital music (one of Ayre's good friends is Vancouver rocker Bif Naked) and online casino gaming and sports betting. Because internet gambling is prohibited in the U.S., Ayre runs the business mainly out of Antigua, where he lives, and houses Bodog's servers at Kahnawake, the Mohawk reserve south of Montréal. In this way he has evaded the U.S. prohibition against using telephones or other communications devices "in interstate or foreign commerce" in order to take bets. Bodog pays no U.S. taxes, has no U.S. assets, and Ayre himself is not a U.S. citizen. Most of the gamblers who use the site are Americans, but that's not Ayre's concern. He's playing a cat-and-mouse game with the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service; so far the mouse remains unscathed.
