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Quote of the Day: Canadian writer on vaseline in MMA
By Zach Arnold | March 9, 2009
It’s fun watching the UFC types get all squirmy about Georges St-Pierre getting nailed for cheating by greasing up his body with Vaseline. And this is the guy that Sportsnet viewers picked as Canada’s athlete of the year? How I long for the days of real wrestling, when Mean Gene Okerlund would scream about somebody “pulling a foreign object out of their shorts.” Prediction: as the economy goes in the crapper, mixed martial arts joins the scrap heap of sports.
He must be reading all those Bleacher Report articles that are invading Google News, CBS Sports, and Fox Sports RSS feeds.
Topics: Canada, MMA, Media, UFC, Zach Arnold | 8 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
It’s the Globe and Mail. They are extremely Neocon and has that reputation. I mean just look at their dumbass review of a “Brandon Crisp documentry”
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/03/06/cbc-air-investigative-report-brandon-crisp-case-tonight
Virtually every single word in that paragraph is completely false.
“It’s fun watching the UFC types get all squirmy about Georges St-Pierre getting nailed for cheating by greasing up his body with Vaseline.”
1. I don’t know how he defines ‘UFC types’ but virtually no one is even talking about this anymore, and no one is ’squirming’.
No one inside or outside the UFC (aside from BJ Penn’s camp and two 13-year-olds from Sherdog) believe that a dab of Vaseline would have caused GSP to completely demolish Penn.
This was largely due to lack of oversight and poorly defined rules regarding conduct in between rounds, rather than a direct reflection of the UFC, or any of it’s fighters.
2. GSP was not the one ‘greasing’ himself, it was a trainer
3. Even Dana White said that GSP was NOT cheating, but suspected the trainer was
“How I long for the days of real wrestling, when Mean Gene Okerlund would scream about somebody “pulling a foreign object out of their shorts.””
4. Okerlund was primarily an interviewer, not a commentator. He never screamed about ‘foreign objects’.
“Prediction: as the economy goes in the crapper, mixed martial arts joins the scrap heap of sports.”
5. The UFC is actually growing, not shrinking. The same cannot be said about many other sports during the recession.
“2. GSP was not the one ‘greasing’ himself, it was a trainer
3. Even Dana White said that GSP was NOT cheating, but suspected the trainer was”
If your trainer tells you what supplements to take, and you later test positive for roids…did you cheat, or was that only your trainer?
If GSP allowed his trainer to put Vaseline on his body, he cheated.
I don’t put much stock in Jeff Blair’s opinions. He is part of a contingent of ‘grumpy old men’ in the Canadian sports media. They quite often assemble on Bob McCown’s bitchfest ‘Prime Time Sports’ where they sit and all recite the same opinion, often a complaint about today’s sports landscape, and then sit and high five each other for their shared bitterness. They are old guys who long for the days of yore when sports were ‘pure’. They resort to conjecture and stunted logic while denying facts to marginalize anyone who disagrees with them. MMA is a pet subject of theirs.
^ Stephen Brunt is a great writer and he likes MMA (great boxing writer), but I agree with you about the rest.
It appears that the failure of Bodog and EXC have kept everyone out of the market for new MMA promotions. Oh, wait, no they didn’t! Now some guy is gonna hire Don King to advise him on promoting MMA fights. That news comes the same, what, 30 day period that Bellator tickets go on sale, Strikeforce has a deal with CBS/Showtime, and Roy Jones runs a boxing/MMA crossover show. Chicken Littles: When is the sky falling again? You seem to be doing awful with those assessments.
RIS,
I agree with you about Brunt. But guys like Kelly and Deacon and the like are who I had in mind.
Sure, why not.
Everybody is entitled to an opinion.
People ragging on MMA doesn’t really bother me at all (as long as it doesn’t reach Mccain levels of interferance).
If he cant appreciate it, shucks for him.
Thats just his loss IMO. It doesn’t effect me or my enjoyment at all.