Rest easy, fight fans. Anthony Johnson will fight Jimi Manuwa in the co-main event of UFC 191 on Sept. 5 in Las Vegas after a "thorough investigation by a third-party law firm," hired by the UFC to review Johnson's interactions with a woman at his South Florida gym found, well, who knows what.
We do know the Johnson-Manuwa fight is still on, because 25 of the 143 words in the statement the UFC issued on Monday made clear to point that out.
What we know is that on Aug. 18, Johnson made an inflammatory statement on his Facebook page about a woman who apparently dared to stretch on a yoga mat near where he was lifting weights.
And we further know that a day later, a not-exactly-contrite Johnson issued statement in which he kind-of, sort-of apologized but more or less tried to cover his butt because his bosses got angry at the tenor of his Facebook post.
Also, we know that Johnson will undergo some sort of counseling.
According to the UFC's statement, Johnson has also agreed to make a donation to a Florida-based women's charity.
What we don't know is:
• Which law firm investigated the incident and who paid for it.
• What the results of said law firm's investigation were.
• Who was interviewed in the course of the investigation and what they might have said.
• When, where and for how long Johnson will undergo counseling, as well as from whom.
• What charity did Johnson make a donation to and how much the donation was.
• Whose idea the donation was in the first place, since the UFC's unsigned statement read, "Johnson has also agreed to make a donation to a Florida-based women's charity." That would suggest someone told him to make the donation for appearance's sake.
It usually isn't news when two people have an argument at the gym.
But it becomes news given Johnson's history with domestic violence. In 2009, Johnson was arrested and charged with domestic violence, battery, death threats and destroying a phone to prevent the report of a crime. Johnson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of domestic violence in 2010, though he told police his ex-girlfriend struck him first when he went to her home to visit his dog.
In 2014, the UFC suspended Johnson following a separate incident with the mother of his children. He was later reinstated when she decided not to pursue charges and withdrew a protective order.
This, though, isn't to crucify Johnson. Sure, the latest incident shows he's guilty of losing his cool and making an inappropriate post on social media. Many of us, though, wish we had it to do over again after pushing the send button.
He's not unique in that regard.
Rather, this is on the UFC for how it handles such incidents. It makes the NFL look honest in its handling of deflate-gate.
When the NFL commissioned the investigation of allegations that the Patriots had intentionally let air out of the footballs the offense used in the AFC championship game earlier this year against the Colts, it noted that attorney Ted Wells would handle it.
NFL fans could assess Wells' credibility and biases when reading his report.
Then, when Wells made his report, it was released for the public to parse. We know who was spoken to, what they were asked and how they answered.
Such was not the case in the UFC situation.
As is often the case with the UFC, there was little-to-no transparency. And that's increasingly become a problem.
When the UFC fired cut man Stitch Duran last month for what Duran said were critical remarks of the company's deal with Reebok, a veteran UFC official insisted off the record that wasn't the case. He was let go, the person said, for an entirely different reason.
Later, Lawrence Epstein, the UFC's chief operating officer, seemed to back that up when he said publicly that Duran wasn't fired for criticizing the Reebok deal.
The UFC, in keeping its information to itself, often points to the fact that it's a private company.
But the NFL is a private company, as well. It has transparency, though, with its customers and makes such information public.
Nobody is asking the UFC to make its business secrets public. That would be foolhardy.
At the same time, though, just a little bit of transparency would go a long way in building the public's confidence in it.
The statement on the Johnson situation was simply the height of arrogance; the UFC essentially making a self-serving statement and expecting everyone to blissfully accept it.
The possibility exists that everything was on the up-and-up and everything was handled perfectly here.
Perhaps Johnson had a bad day at the gym and later regretted lashing out publicly.
Perhaps the third-party law firm did indeed do a thorough investigation.
Perhaps it was Johnson's idea to make the donation to charity.
Perhaps it was the woman whom Johnson ranted at who asked that it be kept on the down-low.
Perhaps.
At the end of the day, the way it was handled makes it appear that the so-called "thorough investigation," was little more than a ham-handed attempt to sweep it under the rug before pesky reporters began making Johnson's history of domestic violence an issue prior to UFC 191.
People aren't perfect. They make mistakes.
The vast majority of the public gets that. All they ask is for a little honesty and some transparency.
That was woefully lacking, sadly, in the Johnson case.
And that's all too often the norm these days.
