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Denny Burkholder has some things to get off his chest
By Zach Arnold | December 18, 2007
Popular MMA message boards tend to hate mainstream MMA coverage, with posters wondering aloud “why don’t they just hire people like us?” (Which draws various far-reaching assumptions such as that mainstream writers didn’t know about MMA until The Ultimate Fighter, never posted on an MMA message board, and are not, therefore, “people like us.” Which is wrong on all counts. Believe it or not, some of us were following the sport before today’s major MMA websites and message boards existed. **Raises hand.**)
Virtually every major MMA-specific website has a partnership with a mainstream sports site. Many blogs do also.
Bloggers that used to write about MMA for fun now seem more concerned with scoring a big partnership, selling ads, and “cashing in.” Others have shifted their focus from covering the sport of MMA (for fun) to skewering the media’s coverage of MMA (for sport).
In other media-related news, Big John McCarthy is not ruling out the possibility of refereeing another MMA match. Plus, Big John is not a fan of The Zuffa Myth:
Rules changes all the time back then [in the early days of UFC]. If you ask Dana White, he’ll say there were no rules back then and that’s not true. Dana doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 19 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Burkholder’s opinion has been echoed in many posts on FightOpinion, and that kind of attitude pretty much dominates MMA forums. Some people just don’t like a critical and/or dispassionate voice, since MMA’s fans are so easily wrapped up in the sport.
Yeesh, that quote from John McCarthy makes it seem as though there was more to his UFC departure than was announced at the time. McCarthy was the longest-running institution in the entire UFC, going back to UFC 2, so when he says, “Dana White doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” that means a lot more than it does even when Miletich or Shamrock(s) or Couture say the same kind of thing. In any case, with McCarthy out of the UFC referee picture, I hope that the newly-opened-up ref duties for some fights go to Yves Lavigne or Steve Mazzagatti. Mario Yamasaki tends to be way too late with his stoppages sometimes (as the EliteXC event in Hawaii showed).
I’m with Ivan on this.
While he didn’t really throw Dana under the bus, his comments were a lot more truthful & critical of White than we’ve ever heard coming from “Big” John before. Good for him!
I’m really happy that he didn’t go out just spouting the “party line” regarding the UFC. I think it’s also very interesting that he made a point of saying that Randy Couture was/is his favorite fighter.
I think this is yet another addition to the box of evidence whose exhibits show that all is not as well as they’d like us to believe in the UFC house …
He didn’t retire because of problems with Dana. He’s not even a Zuffa employee. He got a job offer from Fight Network, which is a substantial pay raise from being a referee and is probably something that he wants to do. Unfortunately the AC’s believe there’s a conflict of interest, so he can’t ref and work at the new job simultaneously.
Stop trying to twist every little thing to make it Dana’s fault. It’s ridiculous. This in way proves that “all is not as well as they’d like us to believe in the UFC house” or that “there was more to his UFC departure than was announced at the time”. It only proves that John publically refuted the Zuffa myth, nothing more.
This is from the same article by the way:
“I characterize Dana as a committed businessman. He is a guy who works to death to promote the UFC and has done a good job of that. Has he made mistakes? Absolutely. Is he perfect? Absolutely not. Is everything he puts out to the media how the sport got started the truth? No. But he’s dedicated and devoted. Because of Dana the sport has come to a higher level, no doubt about it. But it’s not just because of Dana. Dana had Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta; he had money behind him”
Yeah, really sounds like he thinks Dana is the anti-Christ.
Now I just have to wait for you guys to use the Fertitta reference at the end to argue that Big John thinks anybody with money could have revived and grown the UFC, and Dana had nothing to do with it.
Big John needs to get started organizing a fighters union, or at least give his public moral support to the effort. His credibility and moral authority are unrivaled.
I was excited to listen to him on Eddie Goldman but the quality was painfully unlistenable. I couldn’t hear a word he said, I had to switch it off 🙁
MMA is in its infancy. A fighters union and a strike would cripple it.
Pay is going up all the time. Why advocate fighter’s unions? Any one who thinks that the UFC is not paying their fighters enough will be happy to know that Zuffa has just raised the PPV price to 45. Pay raises come with a price. As the fighters’ pays increase, so will your cable bill.
A fighter’s union probably wouldn’t work anyway, since I don’t think any fighters are going to argue that the big draws shouldn’t get big paychecks. It would kind of neutralize the competitive pressure to win, which is what helps produce great fights.
Yamasaki is the best ref. NHB lives!
This has nothing to do with MMA, but while we’re on the subject of mainstream media in general, Time Magazine has officially lost all credibillity. Did Kim Jong Il come in second place?
Are you claiming Time lost credibility by putting someone deserving on the cover as Man of The Year rather than something like, “You” last year? You should look up a list of prior “winners”. Joseph Stalin is a two time winner, Hitler won, Mohammad Mosaddeq, Nikita Krushchev, Ayatullah Khomeini, King Faisal….all winners. Its not being a great human being that gets you the award, its being the most important, postive or negative.
Their reasoning doesn’t even make sense, though. In their de-facto-apology letter that is called “Why We Chose Vladimir Putin,” they say that it’s about stability… that he created more stability than anyone else. The journalists getting gunned down in the streets for saying anything anti-Kremlin must not have been told about that. But if repression (which creates an appearance of “stability”) in any particular year is the aim, Kim Yong Il did more of it than Putin, although neither Czar Putin nor Lil’ Kim had more of a noteworthy year in 2007 than in years prior. It makes no sense and it absolutely will (nay, already is) being used for propaganda purposes.
Their reasoning doesn’t even make sense, though. In their de-facto-apology letter that is called “Why We Chose Vladimir Putin,” they say that it’s about stability… that he created more stability than anyone else.
If you assume “stability” and “freedom of the press” are one in the same, yes, this logic fails at its core. What Putin has done, whether or not anyone likes him or his tactics, is reverse the fortunes of Russia from dissolving into near third world status back up to at least being a developing nation with great economic growth and increasing clout on the international scene. Kim did none of that. North Korea merely stays in the same stasis its been in for the last 40 years internationally except now that not only can it destroy Seoul on a whim with no one being able to do much about it, they can blow up entire cities in Japan and perhaps the Western US as a deterrent to military action against them.
Russia is a world power and even with limited freedom of the press, growing at a 7% annual clip. North Korea’s population is starving, with no freedom to speak of, 20% of its people are working in gulags, and had to resort to nuclear weapons to extort gas and oil subsidy from the rest of the world.
Kim Jong Il should not be any where near the list.
Oh that reminds me. My site is up for sale for a large sum of money or I will need some big name sponsors. Oh wait…
My sophomore year of college, Sergei Khrushchev (NIkita’s son) spoke to my class about Russia. He wasn’t of the opinion that things were getting much better under Putin – endemic corruption and high crime rates have largely offset a lot of the economic progress in Russia. At least, according to him.
You have to weigh competing definitions of stability, methinks. But Putin should understand that only so much foreign investment is going to come to a country that relies on high commodities prices for its economic successes, and eventually, postindustrial services and goods will require some level of government-industry cooperation that isn’t simply government ownership and hegemony. Think of the shape the US economy would be in if the independent media were relegated to a few regional papers.
But Putin should understand that only so much foreign investment is going to come to a country that relies on high commodities prices for its economic successes, and eventually, postindustrial services and goods will require some level of government-industry cooperation that isn’t simply government ownership and hegemony. Think of the shape the US economy would be in if the independent media were relegated to a few regional papers.
The Chinese model is one he’s likely to copy, and they seem to be doing alright for a country with a restricted press.
Guess you’d have to have a pretty liberal definition of “alright.” China’s leaders are emphasizing immediate economic growth at the cost of everything else. Saying the results have thus far been mixed would be an apologetic way of putting it.
And economic growth based on heavy industry and manufacturing can only get you so far – eventually, you have to raise wages and start to regulate the industry so people stop dying.
Russia would be better off following its own course. The Chinese model, if you could call it that, isn’t really applicable applicable in a country that once possessed a formidable industrial base and a completely literate population. Russia needs postindustrial goods and services. A free press has gainfully employed millions around the world – Putin should give it a shot.
And economic growth based on heavy industry and manufacturing can only get you so far – eventually, you have to raise wages and start to regulate the industry so people stop dying.
They don’t have to do that. They can just as easily lie. I know its a nice thought to think that democratic republics are the final step in the evolution of national social development, but its not true or realistic.
A free press has gainfully employed millions around the world – Putin should give it a shot.
So have press corps that are controlled by the state. Right now, Putin’s interest is to force Russia to become a world player again rather than a bit player, or worse yet, a puppet. The only way it becomes that is with a strong hand. You may not like it but it is what it is.
Regulating heavy industry and raising wages has nothing to do with democracy or republicanism. I don’t see either action has anything to do with the political system in a country. It’s about creating some type of middle-class that can consume the goods your heavy and service industries are producing. Whether this middle class comes to existence in a Russia that’s liberal or democratic is not something I’d postulate on.
Nor have I, in any of my statements, said that liberal democracy is the endgame of social development. I don’t know where you’ve pulled that from.
As far as a free press is concerned, you’re gleefully downplaying the obvious: a free press is absolutely key to postindustrial development. Think of the media you consume every day. I’m not saying Russia is ever going to be anything like the U.S., but a media is quite simply essential to economically developed society. Not a free society – the two don’t have to go hand-in-hand – but if people are not allowed to speak freely, they won’t speak. Or write books, or make movies, or make music, or open slightly left-leaning coffeeshops.
So Russia’s conundrum is obvious. The oil windfall is nice and everything, but the world is rife with histories of failed states that were once dominant exporters.