Twitter Mailbag: Thoughts on GSP’s comments, White’s rebuttal, and UFC Fight Night 35
- from http://mmajunkie.com/ on Jan 16, 2014
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After a long Wednesday night filled with fights of both the verbal and physical variety, this week’s Twitter Mailbag has a lot of stuff to sort through, and a sleep-deprived mind with which to do it. Guess we might as well get right to it.
As always, if you’ve got a question of your own, you can direct it to @BenFowlkesMMA via that Twitter contraption. Cute cat pics are also welcome.
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Sure seems like he’s willing to find out, doesn’t it?
Georges St-Pierre carried the UFC’s water for a long time, but the second he said something that UFC President Dana White didn’t like (by which I mean his semi-retirement after his last title defense), we got a vein-popping rant that ended with GSP planted directly under the bus. I wouldn’t blame him if he heard that and decided that he might as well speak his mind on issues like drug testing and the UFC’s treatment of fighters.
He’s the kind of fighter who could be a game-changing leader in MMA on a number of issues. That’s why it’s kind of a shame that he waited until after he’d stepped away before dipping his toe in those waters. If he’d led that charge from within, it might have been more effective.
Still, it’s hard to go all scorched earth on a guy like GSP, even though that is White’s usual response to such a challenge to his authority. St-Pierre is almost universally regarded as an unimpeachable gentleman warrior of the MMA world. Even the comments that set off this firestorm were pretty diplomatic. Maybe that’s why, instead of going the character assassination route, White wrote GSP’s comments off as “kooky” and “ridiculous.” He tried to portray them as redirected rage over White’s remarks as the UFC 167 post-fight press conference (where even White admits he had a bit of meltdown.) He also chose to focus on the fact that GSP made these comments to the media rather than in a phone conversation with UFC executives, which is kind of a strange point to make, considering how the UFC loves to put other people’s business in the streets when it suits its needs.
Hopefully this gives way to a debate about the real issues, and not a war of words about who said what to whom and who avoided which phone calls. Drug testing in MMA, treatment of fighters in the UFC – these are subjects that are worth talking about. If it’s going to go from talk to meaningful action, however, it’s going to take more than a few sound bites launched from a safe distance.
Not really. Yes, state athletic commissions handle testing in some situations, but there’s no reason the UFC couldn’t go above and beyond that testing (which varies from state to state, and in some places doesn’t exist at all) if it wanted to ensure a cleaner sport.
I think St-Pierre has a valid point here. The drug testing in MMA is completely inadequate, in large part because you can mark down on your calendar exactly when it will take place. You can also count on certain tests – a CIR test to detect the presence of synthetic testosterone, for example – not being done at all.
The only testing that might make a real impact is thorough, random, unannounced testing, and the only organization with the money and the power to implement something like that is the UFC. It’s just that, from the UFC’s perspective, there are more reasons not to do it, especially if it doesn’t have to. It’ll likely stay that way until someone like GSP makes a big enough deal about it, which seems to be what’s happening now. I just wish he’d gotten on this soapbox sooner because the cause could’ve used some help.
I’d like to give Matt Brown the benefit of the doubt here, mostly because I know what it’s like to try to be funny and entertaining while speaking into a microphone, only to realize later that you just came off like a jerk. If he doesn’t like men’s flyweights, regardless of what the knockout statistics for the past month say, fine. If he doesn’t like women’s MMA, for whatever reason, that’s also fine.
Where it went from reasonable difference of opinion to pretty indefensible commentary is when he suggested that, if he’s going to pay for women’s fights, they should be topless. In other words, there’s no value in watching women do anything unless they can be sexualized at the same time. Gross, dude. Dumb and gross.
Again, maybe he was just trying too hard to be funny or edgy or über-masculine (the name of his podcast – “Legit Man S–t” -– sounds like an especially bad Tim Allen routine). I could understand that. I just hope he doesn’t actually feel that way about women because they are half the world’s population. If you think they’re only worth paying attention to when their tops are off, that’s a pretty sad way to go through life.
I guess it depends why he said it. Maybe he’s just messing with the media or trying to get Benson Henderson thinking about something other than the fight. Maybe it’s actually true and this is a refreshing bit of honesty in a sport where every other fighter is seemingly always coming off the best training camps of his or her life. It’s actually kind of nice to hear someone go another direction with it.
The only way it’s a serious problem is if, as you suggest, he’s giving himself an out. But then, Josh Thomson has been at this sport for a while now. He’s battled through all sorts of injuries, pushed through any number of serious setbacks. If he was the kind of guy who was searching for a reason to quit, my guess is he’d have found it by now.
This was something that came up this week when I spoke with Sherdog’s Jordan Breen for his “Press Row” segment. While it does seem like Bellator isn’t feeling too tied to the tournament format these days, I’m not sure it can afford to do away with it entirely just yet. The tournaments are still a major part of Bellator’s unique selling proposition. It transforms the typical Fighter A vs. Fighter B match-ups into compelling bouts with clear, immediate stakes. You need something like that if you don’t have superstars to depend on.
You also need at least a little consistency, however, because otherwise your disgruntled employees like Patricio Freire will make themselves out to be hostages who’ve been lied to and locked down, and that’s no good.
No, ignorance is just ignorance. There’s always going to be that subset of sports fans who either don’t care about performance-enhancing drugs or think we should fling open the doors to the lab and let athletes take whatever they want. That stance is somewhat justifiable in a sport like baseball, where the worst thing that happens is the records become meaningless (and, you know, the role models for Little Leaguers end up looking like bad science experiments).
In MMA, skulls are being smashed and bodies are being broken. You can inject fighters with stuff that makes them stronger and faster, but it doesn’t make their brains any more resilient to long-term damage. There’s also the fact that it’s just outright cheating. The rules say you can’t do this, and if you do it anyway, you’re getting an edge over the people who are actually following the rules.
As for whether ignorance is bliss in these matters, I’m not even sure ignorance is truly possible anymore. The PED genie is out of the bottle, and we all know it. At this point, it seems like the accusation is constantly there, hanging over every fighter to one extent or another. It’s almost to the point where it’s up to them to disprove it, which is depressing, but probably a sign of the times.
Not every fighter is turning him down. I recall Michael Johnson volunteering for that duty, only to have Khabib Nurmagomedov very politely suggest that he hadn’t earned such a fight. That’s the thing people seem to miss in these fight-booking feuds. It’s not that the world of professional fighting is filled with cowards looking to avoid a potential beating. It’s that everybody wants to fight up the ranks instead of down, and the math on that just doesn’t work out.
“Nurmy” is a good example of that problem. He’s obviously a good lightweight, but he’s still at the point where the bump you get from beating him probably isn’t great enough to justify the risk. Not unless you’re somewhere well below him, like Johnson.
I think the Team Alpha Male guys would probably say no, they wouldn’t fight each other even for a UFC belt. Of course, that would only make Dana White more insistent about booking it, which would mean that T.J. Dillashaw and Urijah Faber would get bombarded with questions about it in every interview, possibly until one of them cracked and said something that ever so gradually nudged open the door to that fight (see also: Jon Jones and Rashad Evans).
I wouldn’t worry about it just yet, though. Faber is going to have his hands full in the rematch with Renan Barao. And, regardless of his attempt to rewrite his own record, Dillashaw is currently riding a one-fight winning streak – not six.
Do you mean “can” you cancel as in, is it a good idea? Or do you mean, is it physically possible? Because based on what we’ve been hearing in early complaints, it might be easier to cancel your credit card and change your name than to get rid of that UFC Fight Pass subscription.
But yes, you’re right that so far the Fight Pass content has not been as exclusive as the UFC originally made it out to be. In fact, a lot about Fight Pass isn’t as the UFC made it out to be. Everything about it feels like a work in progress, which might be justifiable to some extent since we’re still in the free-trial phase. Then again, the point of a free trial is supposed to be to get people hooked on the service now so they’ll pay for it later. At least so far, I can’t say that that’s what’s happening.
Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.
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