Ghosts of My Past: Confessions of an MMA Asshole

This weekend I got the unexpected opportunity to write a piece about the great Jon Jones for Bloody Elbow. Their original plans fell through for them and they needed someone to step up at the last minute and lend a hand.

I was happy to help.

The subject was Jon Jones, a fighter I’d covered closely over the ten years I wrote about MMA, traveling often to his homebase in Albuquerque to figure out who he is and what he’s about. Writing something about his legacy? That’s right in the middle of my wheelhouse.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I haven’t written anything for less than four figures in quite a long time. But this? This was different. The intrepid “Kid” Nate Wilcox asked me to name a price. It was zero dollars.

I wouldn’t be who I am without the site and the lessons I learned there, mostly about the kind of person and writer I don’t want to be. More importantly, they occupy a space in the MMA media that is too important to lose. I want them to succeed. Someone needs to speak truth-to-power and, with the consolidation of the sport’s media coverage into a handful of corporate fiefdoms, their voices are needed more than ever.

The piece was fine. I hadn’t written on deadline in years, but we cranked it out within an hour and launched their new enterprise. Jones, frankly, made it easy by completely outclassing Gane in a way that made the entire event feel vaguely ludicrous. This was the best we had for the greatest fighter of all-time after a three-year hiatus?

The response has mostly been kind, but you don’t return home without opening up a few wounds, no matter how old the calluses may feel. Most likely you know me from my books like Shamrock or my longform profiles and interviews at places like Bleacher Report and The Ringer. When I think about my writing career, I’m thinking about stuff like this profile of MMA coach Greg Jackson, the two of us together searching for ghost towns in the New Mexico desert or this recent exploration of the Montreal Screwjob, the most important professional wrestling match in modern memory.

But, as I was reminded in the comments section of my new Bloody Elbow article, to some I will always be the “Skip Bayless of MMA.” For, that I have the site to thank—and myself to blame.

Breaking into the media world isn’t easy and my path has been unusual to say the least. The first assignment I ever took for money was a book—bored at work one day I pitched the editors at ECW Press an MMA history project called Total MMA (the name of the struggling online magazine my friends and I did for fun).

To my great surprise, they said yes.

To be frank, the work was a great success, at least commercially, and I had many offers and opportunities in its wake. I wrote for video game sites, general pop culture sites and even a couple of MMA blogs like Sam Caplan’s seminal Five Ounces of Pain.

But finding a job in the MMA space proved exceedingly difficult. Like all up-jumped message board posters and struggling bloggers, I’d slagged most of the established names in the business on the come-up, a dangerous combination of righteous indignation and petty jealousy fueling some truly scathing posts. That meant some sites were out. I was a renegade and the only place that truly welcomed me in was Bloody Elbow.

This was the site where the smart fans gathered to talk shop. But they needed something to talk about, especially during the long weeks between events. That’s where I came in, taking my sometimes oft-kilter views and amplifying them by a factor of ten. I was a flame thrower there, never over the line, but walking right up to it. I said things readers were thinking, things others had the good sense to leave unwritten. People loved me or hated me and I embraced it, playing it up to the hilt in the comments section where I became a caricature of the power-mad moderator. It was fun, exhilarating, exasperating but, ultimately, mostly empty. Worse, it was a detriment to the kind of serious history work I wanted to be doing.

When the parent company bought MMA Fighting and I didn’t get a ticket to ride on the shiny new ship, I exited right and built a new site with the great Brian Oswald, Chad Dundas and Jeremy Botter, helping turn Bleacher Report into an MMA powerhouse. Slowly I was able to morph into a feature writer doing magazine-style profiles, traveling the country to help tell the stories you can’t tell sitting at a press conference or watching people weigh-in from a cordoned off section up front.

I’m pretty proud of the work we did there. It mattered, making fans and others in the media smarter about how the UFC really worked and giving people a glimpse of who fighters really were and what made them tick.

To some, however, I will always be Skip Bayless with a tight fade. And I won’t hide from that. I said some smart things at Bloody Elbow. I said some really dumb ones too, all in the name of engagement. Even all these years later, the battles in those comment sections still haunt some people. For that, please accept my apologies.

I was the most clicked writer on the site—but maybe that’s not always a goal worth pursuing at all costs. I realize now that I wasn’t happy being the loudest voice in the room and I wasn’t always the nicest person to readers, other staffers who didn’t fully understand the game we were playing, or even colleagues like Nate who wanted to establish boundaries while growing a commercial enterprise. Even outlaws have left and right limits.

Today the site doesn’t feature the kind of writing they asked me to do more than a decade ago. I don’t do it either—much. But it’s a part of both our pasts. I am Bloody Elbow and the site has my DNA built into its structure, informing what it has become. I’m proud to be an alum and wish them all the best.

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