Chael Sonnen continues mighty struggle against truth, but now he's on losing end

It’s kind of a shame Chael Sonnen never got a chance to make a go of it in politics. As his appearance on FOX Sports 1’s “America’s Pregame” demonstrated on Tuesday, that man can obfuscate with the best of them.

At least, he seems to think he can. Over the course of an uncomfortable nearly 15-minute segment, Sonnen made a number of claims that ranged from questionable to laughable to demonstrably untrue, and he did it all with the confident air of a man who sees himself as a genius lying to idiots.

That’s the part that gets me, to tell you the truth. It’s not the fact that Sonnen lied to us – which, by the way, he did, but more on that later. It’s the fact that he seemed so sure he’d get away with it.

Like the clever octopus, Sonnen seems to think that all he needs to do to escape danger is cloud the water. The more confusion he can sow in the minds of the people listening to him, and the more he can gradually undermine that old-fashioned idea that words like “banned” and “substances” actually have fixed, unwavering definitions, the better off he thinks he’ll be.

You can’t blame him for thinking it, really. It’s worked so well for him in the past, so much so that just recently he had none other than UFC President Dana White floating his name as a possible heir to the organization’s top job. It’s just that this time he seems to have overestimated his own abilities to bend the truth into an unrecognizable form. This one, weirdly enough, seems like it might stick.

Let’s start with what we know. Sonnen – as in the same guy who recently got up on the set of “UFC Tonight” and called out Wanderlei Silva for being a longtime suspected drug cheat – failed the second drug test of his career. The first was for synthetic testosterone. The second was for banned substances he took to help him transition off of synthetic testosterone. This, Sonnen would have us believe, is as much the fault of the athletic commission as it is his. Maybe even more, since they’re the ones who “changed the rules” on him.

Only, no, that’s not true. The Nevada State Athletic Commission changed its rule on therapeutic-use exemptions for testosterone-replay therapy, but not on drugs like hCG or clomiphene, both of which Sonnen admitted to taking, and both of which are and have been on the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list. Dennis Siver just got fined and suspended for testing positive for hCG a couple months ago. He had his win overturned as well. Weird how the UFC didn’t bring the company president on a TV show aired by its broadcast partner to cast doubt on that one. Instead it just accepted it as failed test and expected Siver to do the same. How about that.

But hey, it’s not like Sonnen showed up jacked to his eyeballs on this stuff for an actual fight, right? He was using it “out-of-competition,” as he pointed out several times, both in his FS1 appearance and in a hastily thrown together and absolutely cringeworthy interview with actor Jay Mohr.

Only, sorry, that doesn’t matter. These drugs are banned in and out of competition, not that the distinction really means anything in a sport where fighters train year-round and can be called up to compete on a few days’ notice. Three months out from a fight is when the most intense training often takes place. You don’t get to claim to be “out of competition” then just because the cameras aren’t pointed in your direction.

But then, how could Sonnen possibly know all these rules? It’s all so complex and it’s not like there’s some website you can go to with a list of all the banned substances. Except that there is. And just in case that’s too much work, you can call the Nevada State Athletic Commission (number’s right there on the website), and they’ll tell you what you can and can’t take (they even have a “wallet card” you can print out and stick in your pocket).

Or you could just follow the news closely enough (as you’d assume a “UFC Tonight” employee might) to hear that another fighter just got popped for using the same drug you’re using, and in the same state, and that should maybe raise a red flag or two.

The sad thing is, Sonnen probably didn’t need to lie to us here. He could have told us the truth, which is that he was the MMA equivalent of a heroin addict on the MMA equivalent of methadone, and his mistake was trying to take a fight before he’d had the chance to get all the way clean – assuming, of course, that he ever did intend to eventually stop taking banned substances altogether.

We would have believed that. We might have even sympathized with it. After all, isn’t this mess also the fault of athletic commissions like the NSAC, which were fine with handing out testosterone exemptions right up until it became politically untenable, at which point they immediately distanced themselves from it like they’d known it was a bad idea all along?

And how about the UFC, which seems willing to lay the blame on everyone from the commissions to the fighters – everyone but itself, really, even though it handed out a few exemptions of its own, sometimes in secret? As much as White likes to claim now that he was always against TRT, the indelible record of the Internet proves otherwise.

Not only did White come out in support of the use of synthetic testosterone, his company gave fighters such as Antonio Silva and Quinton Jackson permission to use it when there was no commission looking over its shoulder.

If it’s true, as White said on Tuesday, that TRT isn’t something you can just quit “cold turkey,” then why does his organization keep trying to book known users in fights just months after the practice was banned? What, does he think that, for fighters who up until recently had permission to use one banned substance, there would be an automatic grace period wherein they were allowed to use others? Because that seems like the kind of thing you might want to clarify with the commission. Don’t tell me White also lost the NSAC’s phone number.

It’s a ridiculous situation, in other words, made more so by absurd explanations from people who think very little of their fans. And maybe they’re right to. Maybe we’ve taught them that they can get away with that.

But this time feels different, for some reason. It feels like the point where these stammering, internally inconsistent explanations are finally pulled out into the open long enough for us to get a good look at them. And when we do, that’s when we realize that they make no sense at all, and they never have.

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