Summer 2009: A small group of reporters ascended a hidden flight of stairs in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. While thousands of people milled around the UFC’s first Fan Expo, we were going up to a small room for a private audience with one of the most unlikely celebrities of our time.
Kimbo Slice was waiting for us.
We didn’t know what to expect from a man we knew mostly from bare-knuckled poundings of fellow Floridians on YouTube. And we soon found out he would play with our expectations. When I asked if he would wear a microphone so I could record the interview, he snarled, “Nah, man, I ain’t about that,” and looked away.
With perfect comic timing, he ended the awkward silence. “It’s all right,” he said with a smile. “I’m just playin’.” He took the microphone and charmed his way through the interview.
Saturday’s UFC 199 card could have been a perfect demonstration of MMA drama based solely on what happened in the cage. Dan Henderson, one of the early wave of accomplished wrestlers who gave the emerging sport credibility, defied his age (45) with a stunning knockout of fearsome fighter Hector Lombard. Then Michael Bisping, a pioneering Englishman who rose to fame on UFC reality show The Ultimate Fighter, took the UFC middleweight championship from Luke Rockhold, who had beaten Bisping in 2014. Kimbo Slice died on Monday, the tragic coda to a 72-hour span that showed MMA at its best and worst. This is a sport that has, in a perfect storm of new media and fickle public tastes, challenged our concepts of celebrity and humanity.
Bisping had long been a contender who couldn’t quite break through, losing multiple bouts in which the winner was all but guaranteed a title shot. The first was a loss to Henderson at the glittering UFC 100, which coincided with that first Fan Expo at Mandalay Bay. Bisping had been cast as the villain in that bout after feuding with Henderson on a USA v UK season of The Ultimate Fighter. But on Saturday, he exulted in newfound respect after stepping in on short notice in for the injured Chris Weidman and winning the UFC belt.
Helwani, Lin and Leydon aren’t the first journalists the UFC has told to get lost for dubious reasons. Loretta Hunt and Guardian correspondent Josh Gross have spent years carving out careers without UFC credentials. But this move was still shocking. Helwani is the face of the MMA media, a ubiquitous, unflappable presence who has worked for Fox Sports as well as the SB Nation site MMA Fighting.Yet even as Bisping started to celebrate a legacy-changing moment, the talk of the MMA world had shifted outside the cage, where the UFC hadkicked out a trio of journalists – Ariel Helwani, Esther Lin and E Casey Leydon – for the petty crime of Helwani breaking the news that pro wrestler and former UFC champion Brock Lesnar would be returning to the cage.
And Lin and Leydon, a photographer/videographer duo who were apparently expelled for sharing an employer with Helwani, are renowned in MMA circles for showing the humanity of these people who inflict pain within a chain-linked realm.
Helwani did a quick media tour over the next 36 hours, then devoted his MMA Hour broadcast on YouTube to a tearful two-hour retelling of the path he has taken in MMA journalism, revealing the tangled ethics of covering the sport. He does skillful interviews – a typical episode of the inaccurately named MMA Hour may have four hours of in-depth chats with eight or more fighters and other figures in the sport – lending credibility to his ambition to be the Howard Cosell of MMA. But he also chased scoops, trying to get tidbits of news before the competition.
At one point along the way, Helwani said, he was technically on the UFC’s payroll. That confession triggered a new wave of backlash. On Sunday morning, Deadspin ran with the sympathetic headline “UFC Throws Reporter Out Of Event, Bans Him For Life For Reporting News.” After Helwani’s show, the new post was“Blackballed MMA Reporter Admits He Was UFC’s Paid Shill.”
That’s an awkward situation. But it’s awkward for anyone who covers this sport. As long as UFC president Dana White tosses out reporters who’ve sinned in his eyes, the people who are still in his good graces look tarnished. (That includes me, during my three-year stint covering MMA for USA Today, an organization White and company aggressively courted – then later claimed to have bankrolled the paper’s UFC coverage.)
Central to this whirlwind of accusations is White himself, who exemplifies the sport’s redefinitions of celebrity and humanity. He warmly greets fans of all kinds, particularly veterans and anyone struggling with disability. In turn, many fans revere him, with Q&A sessions at Fan Expos and other events turning into testimonies of faith that would make a televangelist blush.
With such enabling, it’s little surprise White sometimes acts without considering the repercussions. A wild rant against Loretta Hunt in 2009 prompted the rarest of White acts – an apology – though he stopped well short of trying to reconcile with Hunt.
McGregor and Diaz are finally set for a rematch, but the path was complicated by the three-way collision of egos between the two fighters and White, who removed McGregor from the much-hyped UFC 200 card because McGregor would not fulfill marketing obligations.But White is far from alone in having his head spun by enablers and a sense of invincibility. The sport’s two biggest stars in recent years, Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, built themselves up with much bluster, then found themselves in limbo after humbling defeats in the cage. Holly Holm exposed Rousey’s overconfidence, picking apart the Olympic judo medalist with deft kickboxing and finishing the fight with a devastating head kick. McGregor learned the hard way that you simply do not knock out one of the Diaz brothers, punching past the point of fatigue until Nate Diaz turned the tables and won with a choke.
That’s a far cry from the days in which fighters readily gave out their own phone numbers to reporters. And it demonstrates the difficulty White and company will have in maintaining an iron grip over a sport that has been producing mainstream celebrities – the latest being Paige VanZant, the runner-up on the most recent season of Dancing With The Stars.
As large as the sport is, a trivial incident can now trigger an earthquake. Was it so important for Helwani to report the Brock Lesnar news a couple of hours before the UFC could make its own announcement? Maybe not. But it also didn’t hurt. If anything, the leak to Helwani stirred up talk just a couple of hours before the UFC confirmed it.
Last night, the UFC announced Helwani, Lin and Leydon would be welcome to return. And then that news shared the spotlight along with shocking news that will unite MMA’s warring factions in mourning.
The irony of Kimbo Slice as a uniter cannot be understated. When the YouTube video sensation started fighting with rival promotion EliteXC, snagging coveted prime-time network TV treatment, the UFC belittled his fighting credentials – with some justification, given EliteXC’s unwarranted hype of the modestly skilled Slice as a legitimate world class talent. When I wrote a story for USA Today juxtaposing Slice and EliteXC with the growing UFC, it triggered a polite but pointed phone call from the UFC’s PR staff.
But Slice’s heart won over skeptics. Told he would have to go through The Ultimate Fighter to make it to the UFC, he agreed to live in the reality show’s fishbowl, where he showed a warm heart and good sense of humor. He even won a UFC fight before falling back to earth and embarking on a meandering boxing career before returning to MMA with the UFC’s biggest current rival, Bellator.
The often talkative White has only three tweets in the last 24 hours. Two are responses to fans. One is a respectful picture of Kimbo wearing UFC gloves.
Mixed martial arts has struggled with celebrity, taking awkward steps into the mainstream. But the sport has also gained credibility by showcasing the humanity of these men and women who punch, kick and choke each other. The past 72 hours have shown the sport at its best and worst, its most divided and most unified, showing the complex and compelling nature of a sport that is becoming difficult to ignore.
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