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August, 2019
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On August 28, 2019 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Why Do We Interview Fighters?

Rarely is it a good sign when those who report the news become the news. 

On August 23rd, Conor McGregor appeared on ESPN for some damage control. Footage of McGregor punching a 50-year-old man in a pub in April started to make the rounds online, and as such, the former two-division Ultimate Fighting Championship titleholder needed a helping hand to rehabilitate his public image. Enter ESPN’s Ariel Helwani.

Helwani is the most prominent media member in MMA and works for the biggest media brand in all of sports, so it was sensible for McGregor to seek out this platform. However, there’s more to it than just good sense. Helwani also happens to be king of the media softball league, known more for cozying up to fighters and managers than for any substantive journalistic effort. For McGregor, who in the last two and a half years has inflicted more violence outside of competition than inside of it, Helwani was the best possible sparring partner to make him look good since Paulie Malignaggi…

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On August 21, 2019 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Everybody Sucks, and Other Reasons to be Patient

Describing anything as patient is usually a backhanded compliment. Patience is a good thing, of course, but it’s also a common euphemism for boring. If a date describes you to their friends as “patient,” it probably doesn’t bode well for your romantic future. Nobody wants to watch a football team that plays a “patient” brand of offense, let alone a “patient” fight. Patience is fundamentally unsexy, as virtues tend to be. This is a cage fight; shoot all the just-bleed vices directly into my veins.

Yet UFC 241 on Saturday in Anaheim, California, gave us plenty of reason to appreciate the different ways in which patience can present itself in the fight business…

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On August 7, 2019 By In Social Media

Colby Covington Knows What He’s Doing

Colby Covington is perhaps the greatest Rorschach test in the Ultimate Fighting Championship today. Fans of his see him as a Making America Great Again patriot dunking on the nerds and virgins of the world; detractors see him as a corny caricature who thinks being annoying is the same as being alpha. Some love him for his toughness and tenacity in the cage, while others loathe him for his inability to finish fights. Regardless, people seem to love and hate him for the same reasons, and whatever you think of him probably says a lot more about you than it does about him.

This gives Covington a veneer of complexity, but in reality, he’s one of the most straightforward and simple fighters to understand. He’s an astute observer of what makes fighters successful, both in and out of the cage, and he has dedicated himself to realizing those traits to the fullness of his potential…

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On August 7, 2019 By In Social Media

Ingredients of a Rebound

Ideas become cliché for the simple reason that they are, in essence, obvious, so while phrases like “you either win or you learn” or “it’s only a loss if you don’t learn anything” are rightfully met with yawning indifference, they are still basically true. Mistakes and failures are inevitable, whether in the cage or the cubicle. What matters is not avoiding those failures but squeezing them for whatever nuggets of wisdom we can get out of them.

At UFC 240 in Edmonton, Alberta, on Saturday, Cris Cyborg and Max Holloway demonstrated what they learned from their previous fights: A little bit of patience can go a long way…

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