Intelligent Defense

Tank Abbott and Drew Fickett, Seperated at Birth

2008-02-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

Inside MMA is both really great and really terrible.
Here's a little cheatsheet to tell if something is the former or the latter.
If it takes place inside the studio it will suck, if it is a satellite interview or with Ron Kruck it will be good, very good.

Interviews with MMA stars is really something you can't get anywhere else on TV and the highlights from smaller shows that gets shown every work are fabulous and really give the sense that MMA is a growing sport with events going on all over the place every weekend.

The in studio panel is often made up of only one real contributor each week, while fighters are good for interviews when discussing their own fights and what's coming up for them they aren't usually much good when discussing other fighters, or rankings. Fighters are generally too busy and focused on their own doings to have a good grasp on what's going on elsewhere in the world of MMA. Guys like Chuck Liddell and Andrei Arlovski have come off as quiet, soft-spoken, nice guys but haven't really had anything to say about current events.

Lucia Rijker on last weeks show was probably as bad as it can get as she obviously didn't follow MMA and had never seen the show before. She told enthralling stories about how she forgot her notes so couldn't comment on rankings, asked why the PFC show was in a ring and not a cage, and asked why they were only showing still shots of the UFC event.

There are some exceptions to the in-studio stuff as Bas is great at everything he does (except beating Kevin Randleman, but that's a whole other story) and some studio guests have been very good like Josh Gross and Ken Pavia, who in addition to being informative displayed chemistry between themselves, Chuck, and Bas.

Kenny Rice is...well there's no real way to describe Kenny. He's awkward, inaccurate, and laughs like a psycho with little provocation. He makes me straight up cringe at least twice an episode which isn't a big deal, when faced with embarassing situations I've always been good at throwing up my earmuffs like I was Randy Couture and lalala-ing until it appears that Kenny has stopped talking.

Acting like Jeffrey Dahmer with a fixation on Compustrike numbers instead of eating young Filipino boys isn't all that terrible, it just takes some getting used to....what I can't get used to is not knowing anything about MMA when your job is that very thing.

Let me set the scene, the panel is Tank Abbott, Jake Shields, and odds maker Nick Kalikas.
They're discussing the riveting Tank/Kimbo fight, and how Kimbo is a 4:1 favorite when Kenny directs a rambling question to Shields about the Tank fight and welterweights....or something.

Jake proceeds to talk about his upcoming fight with Drew Fickett and talks him up as a tough opponent and lists some of the fighters he has beaten like Koscheck, Florian, and Josh Neer.

Now either Kenny wasn't really listening, has no idea who any of those three are, or truly believes that despite Tank has only won once since 1998 that he has somehow beaten those three much lighter fighters at some point when they were like 16 years old. As he responds
"Wow I think you just tilted that line back towards Tank a little" followed by a laugh and a face that has to been seen to believed. Now cut to Jake Shields confused face and to me having to leave the room. I just couldn't stand to listen to the fallout but I imagine it involved more of Kenny Rice laughing and pretending he was making a joke.

Seriously if it was found that Kenny Rice murdered cats and dogs whilst keeping Compustrike scores on his conquests (Kenny landed one literal hammer strike and one acid bath in round one Buster the dog was unsuccessful on all thirteen of his submission attempts)

Well I wouldn't be all that surprised.

Debut n. A seventeenth public appearance, as of a performer.

2008-01-31T13:03:00.000-08:00

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com
/2008/writers/jon_wertheim/01/31/chuck.liddell/index.html

The writers of articles only rarely headline them or caption the pictures so I'm not sure who's to blame for this error, but it's a pretty bad one. In case it gets corrected it read

"Chuck Liddell, left, defeated Tito Ortiz in his UFC debut in 2006. Now Liddell wants a shot at Quinton Jackson."

Nevermind the fact that the very name of UFC 66 was Liddell vs. Ortiz II this caption makes it pretty clear that the caption writer has no idea who Chuck is, no knowledge of the three Couture fights, Babalu both getting his head taken off and showing terrible gameplanning in two seperate UFC fights, the hilarious Vernon White KO or even Chuck getting tapped by Jeremy Horn way back when.

That's not a big deal there are plenty of newer fans to the UFC ....not many so new that they weren't around to see Chuck as a coach for TUF1 but hey the media's just catching on.

But that doesn't excuse the fact that it takes no time to look up Chucks record, here I'll do it right now.

Alright it took google .24 seconds to give me results for the search "Chuck Liddell", the first four results are Chucks home page, Sherdog's fightfinder, his UFC.com profile, and his wikipedia page. Any of those four could be used to find out that Chuck had 16 UFC fights before the second Ortiz fight. Total time spent: 4 minutes, only because I got distracted by Lake Placid 2 ads at Sherdog.
If it never went to theatres why is it a big deal that it's unrated....I guess I'll have to start a straight to DVD advertising criticism blog as well.

My Jordan Breen is Artsy

2008-01-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

I told my friend Yousake that I was beginning a blog critiquing MMA commentary and he was pretty clear in who he thought I should write about.

"You have to write about Jordan Breen from Sherdog, he's pretentious, overwrought, and a gigantic douche."

I don't actually mind Jordan Breen, as I don't think anyone really even cares about him, but hey, topic matter is topic matter.

People who write blogs like to talk about them....nonstop, even though no one else cares about them. And that's the common complaint I hear about Sherdog columnist and radio host Jordan Breen. He blathers about things that very few care about for long periods of time.

It's very evident from reading or listening to Jordan's work that he comes from an internet background rather than a journalistic one, for all intents and purposes Breen is a forum nerd with about 25,000 posts between Sherdog and Bloody Knux. This came through very clearly in his early radio work.

He came off as nervous, inexperienced, he spoke way, way too quickly, and took some outlandish forum-esque opinions like: "There are no legends in MMA". He was rightly taken to task for stuff like that in those very forums. To his credit he has slowly improved in these areas. Well, other than the fact he still exhibits a motor mouth that makes him very easy to tune out, even if what he is saying is pertinent or interesting.

Which is actually most of the time, I believe that most of those who dislike Breen more dislike the subject matter than him. Most people don't care about smaller shows from all over the world as is their wont.

His articles are also relatively benign, basically all they do is save me the time from translating news directly from Japanese news sites or from getting Yousake to give me the scoop...maybe that's why he hates Breen.

Now the main problem I have with Breen is his douch factor, which is high, very high.
Everyone is familiar with guys from school who try too hard to be esoteric, try too hard to be ironic, and cute, well imagine you've reinforced that persons inflated self image by giving them a platform and that's Jordan Breen. His attempted cuteness is painfully clear in his interviews where many of the questions are off topic which is not so bad in itself. However these questions usually hurt the flow of the interviews and come off more as Jordan trying to get himself over as the smartest, most gosh darn amazing wunderkind in the entire world, ratherthan informing the listeners of the program.

In the end I think Breen's problem stems from immaturity and the residual of being exclusively a forum guy rather than an actual living breathing journalist. Two examples make that abundantly clear.

When Breen first started with the radio gig he continued to use his prior account in the Sherdog forums nothing wrong with that right? Well he used that login to post defenses of himself in the third person when anyone questioned his comments from the radio show as can be seen in at least three separate posts here.

http://www.sherdog.net/forums/search.php?searchid=8226237

Seriously that's about the lamest thing of all time right there.

It also shows in his own thread where he pimps his video "pics" of the day to showcase upcoming fighters, but to be honest all he has done is enter the fighters names into Youtube and Dailymotion and linked to the first fights that show up, not exactly groundbreaking journalism.
It also became clear that not even he watches all the videos as Sherdog poster Czechvarmander pointed out in Breen's own thread.

http://www.sherdog.net/forums/showthread.php?t=651091&page=22

If you don't take the time to watch them and make sure they even contain the right fighters why should anyone else bother with them? Seriously it would've only taken two seconds to realize that the 205 pound black circa 2001 Alvin Robinson is not the UFC fighter Alvin Robinson.

I started out being relatively indifferent to Breen but defending yourself from attacks in the third person is about as douchey as it gets.

It also takes little (alright zero) journalistic work to google fighters names for videos, or translate Japanese news.

Bottom line is that I'm still somehow hopeful that as Breen matures he'll stop being so eminently hateable and develop some of the knowledge he clearly has. But for now I'm going to stay away and rely on my good ol' Japanese pal Yousake to hook me up with Pancrase news and Cage Force vids.

MMATorch is Decadent and Depraved

2008-01-29T22:18:00.001-08:00

Imagine you're a young internet upstart running a pro wrestling website.
"This new MMA craze is everywhere", you muse "and real combat is ostensibly the same as fake"
"I'll use my incredibly lucrative Torch brandname to crossover and turn wrestling fans into MMA ones, open a forum, yadda yadda yadda, internet success!!!!111!!!"

There was only several problems with this plan, as Joe Silva would helpfully let you know the location where you are currently residing, is in fact, not Japan.
In Japan pro wrestling is a respected part of the culture and a direct predecessor to MMA, the close connection would allow citizens to garner information about both from the same source without feeling like a skeeze.

However here in America wrestling fans are one of three groups
1) children under the age of nine and their parents
2) hillbillies
3) internet nerds, seriously go to Youtube and look at some of the hideous video blogs created by wrestling fans....why couldn't they hide their horrific acne raddled, basement dwelling faces like bloggers are supposed to.

Only one in three of the above even has access to computers, and sporting/MMA fans don't want to be associated with any of them, providing little chance for MMATorch to attract non-wrestling fans.

There majority of internet wrestling fans aren't even sports fans at all and just actually love pro wrestling, for the pageantry and spectacle of it all and aren't likely to be swayed to a sport with no midgets or backstage tomfoolery.

So suppose despite all those caveats the Torch is able to attract some of its followers to become MMA fans, then they'll stay on MMATorch forever right? Right????

Well, probably not, the Torch has no actual journalist-type writers (the people, not the clickety clackety machines), meaning zero ability to break news, no resources to report on any events that aren't on television, the entirety of their possible worth comes from any analysis they can provide.

And that analysis....how can I put this...it's god awful.
These writers are volunteers, which means in addition to volunteering to write, they are also volunteering to be mocked.
I'll provide an example with my next post.

But frankly the quality of their work and ability to attract readers can be seen from their still current plea for more writing volunteers (please, I can't take any more), and their barren, barren forum.

Seriously, it makes the Sherdog boxing forum look like Times Square on New Years Eve 1989 that year when Thanksgiving fell on January first and the Snoopy balloon from the parade dropped the ball....or something.

Mon Raison D'Etre

2008-01-29T22:10:00.000-08:00

The explosion in popularity of MMA has been fabulous for people who like to watch MMA and for people who like to compete in MMA, but not so great for people who like to read about MMA The money in the sport has led to more of it being broadcast what could possibly be wrong with that?

Well unfortunately more attention has led to a huge influx of MMA websites both mainstream and blog-esque and ignorance has run rampant.

This blog will attempt to chronicle some of that terribleosity by finding the very worst offenders to common sense in the MMA online writing world we live in.

The point is that MMA is attracting a lot of new fans who don't have a ton of knowledge about the history or workings of what truly is a great sport. And MMA journalists, websites, and bloggers have a duty to educate them. Frankly I think they are failing so far.

Buckle up?