Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Precisely 200 numbered UFC events later, my brain finally broke.
My intro to mixed martial arts media came when I sat cageside at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas for UFC 58 in 2006. I had been a fan of the sport since UFC 3 and had just written my first piece, an essay on the UFC’s recent explosive growth fueled by The Ultimate Fighter, for FOXSports.com.
All these years later, I remember a marvelous undercard bout between Sam Stout and Spencer Fisher which stole the show. Up until this point, I thought writing about MMA would be, at best, a fun little diversion from a sort of boring job as a night desk editor. But feeding off the crowd’s electricity just feet away from the Octagon, I intrinsically knew Stout’s split-decision win was the moment I knew this was the direction I wanted to take my career.
Two weeks shy of 15 years later, 11 months into a worldwide pandemic, UFC 258 was under way. My partner was working on his thesis while I grinded through another long night of work-from-home coverage. The undercard brought out much different emotions than UFC 58.
“I would rather go build clean drinking water wells in Africa with Cyborg than ever watch another fucking preliminary fight again,” I said. “I think you maybe need a break from what you’re doing for a living,” my partner understated. Deep down, I knew he was right.
How did I get from Point A — the first person ever to cover MMA for a major mainstream sports outlet — to Point B?
Where went the guy who didn’t think twice about covering UFC 67 in Las Vegas, driving back to Los Angeles in the middle of the night, sleeping four hours, and going into the office the next day at FOX to work 12 hours on Super Bowl coverage?
What happened to the person who covered the Affliction show in Anaheim featuring Fedor Emelianenko’s legendary knockout of Andrei Arlovski one night, a WEC card in San Diego featuring Jose Aldo, Dominick Cruz, Benson Henderson, Urijah Faber and Donald Cerrone the next, then couldn’t wait to get home to rewatch both start to finish?
I worked the night my father passed away. I was told to take the night off, but I was stuck in LA, unable to get a flight home to Boston until the next day. So I went ahead and wrote recaps of UFC 184, headlined by Ronda Rousey’s quick win over Cat Zingano, because that’s what I do, and doing what I do was going to be a hell of a lot easier than spending the evening alone with my thoughts. I’ve heard valid critiques of my work over the years, but no one with a clue has ever questioned my work ethic.
Burnout, however, is a real thing, even for someone who loves what they do, even if it takes 15 years to get there.
Barely a year and a half after I wrote that first piece for FOX, I anchored the MMA and boxing teams for Yahoo Sports as editor. For the better part of five years, I actually more or less lived the life people imagine sportswriters live, traveling everywhere from Hawaii to New York and all points between, staying in the best hotels, eating at the best restaurants.
Post-UFC 114 hotel room editing shift in Las Vegas
It was a work hard, play hard sort of gig. I pulled stunts like staying out until dawn the night before UFC 83 in Montreal, sleeping all day, getting to cageside just in time for the first fight of the night, then staying up until dawn again, this time working after Georges St-Pierre’s memorable win over Matt Serra. I made better money than I ever thought I’d make as a journalist and was treated like a professional. It sure beat the 9-to-5 tedium most of my friends seemed to be settling into.
Since we at Yahoo were the first to put together a full MMA team, that meant we were also the first to experience the flip side so many of my colleagues have since endured: Management who put our combat sports crew together was pushed out, replaced by new overlords who decreed at the end of 2011 that MMA was a fad which passed its peak. Most of the MMA/boxing crew was let go, myself included. Then, of course, Rousey and Conor McGregor’s rise began a year later and blew the UFC up bigger than anyone would have imagined. I don’t know where the brain surgeon who made that decision to nuke things at Yahoo is these days, but the way this business is now, I have little doubt he’s fallen upward into his latest grift.
Next up was the other meaningful era during my time covering MMA, in which I spent seven years as an independent contractor. It was a constant hustle and the perks weren’t as good, but I still made an honest and fulfilling living. My main gig from 2012-19 was with MMA Fighting. I also wrote columns for SI.com, and then jumped back to Yahoo part-time when management changed yet again and those who didn’t want me gone in the first place asked me to do some writing.
Much has been made about the team assembled at MMA Fighting during this era. I’m going to skip the false humility here: We were really fucking great. Maybe I wasn’t the star (again), but if Fighting was the Golden State Warriors, then I was the sixth man on that team, and that’s not a bad spot to have. Maybe I should buy an Igoudala jersey.
I did some of the best writing of my life during this period, nearly all of it tied to topics in which I felt personally invested. I went from writing a profile on Liz Carmouche as the first out LGBT fighter of note to my own professional coming out five years later. Both of my parents passed in 2015, another experience I wrote about, and the empathy I learned from that experience helped me write a profile on Pearl Gonzalez and her late father of which I’m still proud. For Yahoo, I authored a look at the Los Angeles-based Pro Wrestling Guerrilla promotion, which three years later reads like a foreshadowing of the AEW revolution. I also took pride in crafting what amounted to the first well read, in-depth takes on major events by cranking out UFC Aftermath columns when everyone else was either traveling back from the shows or sleeping.
To switch to a different sports analogy, if I wasn’t one of the all-stars during my career, I was the equivalent of the MLB player who stuck around the bigs for 15 years because I could play four different positions. I simply went where the next gig was. That kept me employed and enabled me to live a middle-class life in a city as expensive as Los Angeles.
But it’s become increasingly apparent on this beat you’re either at the very top of the scale, or you’re young and cranking out low-grade boilerplate for cheap in service of the corporate click counters. There’s still some room in between for solid journalists doing legit work, but the lane seems to shrink by the month. You’ve seen some of the talented people who have been unemployed for significant stretches in recent years, bigger names than I, who would never be out of work a day in any sort of healthy industry.
It didn’t take long after I stepped away from my most recent gig to realize I actually liked having weekend nights to myself and that I wasn’t in a rush to step back into another situation which could change on a moment’s notice. I became more open to the idea of trying something new than I have in quite some time.
I’m glad to say I’ll be going to work soon as a staff writer for Panini America. I’m going to write sports cards for a living. I’ve known their editorial director, Jeff Sullivan, going all the way back to the UMass Boston student newspaper in the mid-1990s. I’m really looking forward to this chapter and the chance to apply my skills to something completely new.
I also plan on resigning from my post as Vice President of the Mixed Martial Arts Journalists Association. This is a position which should go to someone who’s all in, and my attention will be elsewhere, so I’m stepping down. I want everyone in the MMAJA who voted for me to know the fact those who have tried to do things the right way considered me worthy of this slot is an honor I will forever cherish. I’ve been a part of this going all the way back to the first attempt to put the group together at UFC 74 in 2007, and there have unquestionably been growing pains along the way, but the MMAJA is heading in the right direction under Josh Gross’ leadership.
Speaking of Josh, I haven’t mentioned many colleagues’ names so far in part because I’m afraid of leaving people out. But the handful of people who understood your struggle were the best part of this job, so I’ll shout out some of the best: Let me start with the crew at MMA Fighting past and present. I’m so glad to call Dave Meltzer, whose Wrestling Observer I’ve read since 1992, a colleague and true friend. Chuck Mindenhall and Shaun Al-Shatti are every bit as good people as they are writers. Esther Lin and Casey Leydon are just awesome. Marc Raimondi might be the best pure reporter on the beat and one of the most authentic people out there. Bryan Tucker is a solid newsman who always did right by his crew, which are qualities I’ve come to understand one should never take for granted in a managing editor. Ariel Helwani and Luke Thomas reached their dizzying heights because they work harder than everyone else, full stop.
How many names mentioned in this space can you spot cageside at UFC 106? (Esther Lin photo)
From my Yahoo days, Dan Wetzel remains by far the best mainstream sports columnist to dabble in MMA, Kevin Iole’s spot in the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame says all you need to know, and Maggie Hendricks added a much-needed voice in the space before going on to bigger and better things.
I could go on and on, here. Ben Fowlkes has always been a great writer and better person. Chad Dundas I don’t think I’ve ever actually met, but I admire his work, too. Pat Wyman has moved on to things so great you almost can’t believe he was once part of the MMA media, and he deserves every bit of success he’s had. People like Steve Marrocco, Damon Martin, and Dann Stupp have been doing this forever and have my admiration for their ability to keep plugging away. Duane Finley and his sidekick Hunter Homistek are good folk. Jonathan Snowden’s always done his own thing, but he’s a great writer, too, and he graciously invited me to participate in his next wrestling book project, which I was happy to accept. Jeremy Botter is an American original. Elias Cepeda is the type of dude who will drive from the South Side of Chicago to pick you up at your hotel by O’Hare after you both covered Miguel Torres vs. Takeya Mizugaki just to take you to a diner he wants you to try all the way back on the South Side. Tom Gerbasi’s one of the best guys you’d ever want to meet. Same goes for Neil Davidson. And Jeff Wagenheim. Todd Martin is the most underrated columnist in the MMA game. The late and much-missed Scott Wilson had no problem putting my stuff on his boxing page at FOX back when most boxing guys were overtly hostile to MMA. Andy Nesbitt has been my friend going back to our ‘90s days interning at the Boston Globe and we’ve crossed paths everywhere from Fox to Yahoo.
And while I’m at it, a nod to all the good behind the scenes people at the promotions along the way, from old-school UFC mainstays like Ant Evans and Dave Sholler to Danny Brener and CJ Tuttle at Bellator to Mike Afromowitz, who’s been everywhere.
(And I’m now well past the tipping point where people are probably going to feel left out if I don’t mention them, but this is getting sappier than a Vermont maple tree, so I’m going to stop here).
If I wrote this several months ago, it might have devolved into a bitter screed about what this industry has become. The asinine pivots to video, the people too close to the sources they were supposed to objectively cover, the online trolls, the endless assembly line of events without an offseason, the pronounced turn in too many places toward fluff and clickbait, most of this wasn’t here when I started in 2006. It slowly built for years, then accelerated during the pandemic to the point I knew I needed to step away.
But as my burnout faded, so did my frustration. My love of the fights, the thing which drew me to this nutty little subculture in the first place, returned. (Hell, even before then, by the end of UFC 258, after griping during the prelims, I was back to oohing and ahhing over Kamaru Usman’s magnificent striking in his welterweight title defense against Gilbert Burns).
And with that distance, the moments experienced from blood-splashing distance over the span of a decade and a half have re-emerged in my brain. Randy Couture coming out of retirement and winning the UFC heavyweight title from Tim Sylvia. Both of GSP’s UFC welterweight title wins. Anderson Silva wrecking Rich Franklin, one-inch punching Forrest Griffin, face-kicking Vitor Belfort. Chris Weidman knocking Silva out. Chan Sung Jung and Leonard Garcia putting on an all-time brawl in Sacramento. Kimbo Slice making James Thompson’s ear explode on network TV. Brock Lesnar knocking out Couture to win the title in his fourth pro fight, rallying to defeat Shane Cawin, then getting finished by Cain Velasquez. McGregor knocking out Aldo. Dan Henderson knocking out Michael Bisping, and Bisping doing the same to Luke Rockhold. Gina Carano and Cris Cyborg with the first major women’s headliner; Miesha Tate and Julie Kedzie blowing the roof off the San Diego Sports Arena; Rousey’s historic fight with Carmouche; Amanda Nunes knocking out Cyborg; Cyborg winning the Bellator title and becoming a four-promotion champ (which, incidentally, turned out to be my final night cageside before the pandemic). If you’re a fan and see one of these live, it’s something you never forget. Working on this beat, these moments made all the other nonsense subside.
There were many tradeoffs involved in working such a job, and I’m only now beginning to make up for lost time in several aspects of my life. But I can’t deny the fun I had and the friends and memories I made along the way.
I hope my friends who are longtimers in this space take care of their mental health and always have an eye on a backup plan, because it’s become plain this business doesn’t love people back.
While I’m off to do something else, I hope to continue dabbling in MMA writing in some form on the side (if you’re a website editor looking for a part-time columnist, let’s talk), and I have a couple book ideas rattling around my brain based on my experiences.
However things go from here, it’s been a hell of a ride.
