If you wanna know why MMA journalism (or what passes for it in this echo chamber) rarely rises above WWE jingoism, look no further than the incredulous performance of the ostensibly credentialed crew at the UFC 200 presser in Las Vegas on April 22, 2016. Led by Ariel Helwani, the conflicted but usually level-headed parser of all things MMA, they performed more like the cheer-leading squad of the Brother Conor Travelin’ Salvation Show than impartial analyzers of the realm. (Cue Neil Diamond if ya dare.) If Ariel Helwani wants to become the Baba Wawa of MMA-wood, it won’t take him much longer to metamorphose. To wit, far from being an impartial journalist, Helwani sounded like a man who suffers pubescent palpitations every time Conor’s name enters the c̶o̶n̶v̶e̶r̶s̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ room. (And to be fair, Joe Rogan sidekick, Brendan Schaub, suffered from the same affliction for the longest time down parting his slicked back hair like Conor in the lead-up to the Mayweather fight. Go back and at footage of the pressers if you doubt this.) Listen to the entire presser from the time Ariel arrives about 7 minutes late, to the time an exasperated Dana shuts him down:
Actual Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCsNAye8AdY
Ariel Helwani as “The Dean”, no …. make that “The Baba Wawa of MMA journalism”, or what passes for it. There is hard, and there is soft. In most mano-a-mano settings Ariel defaults towards the soft, à la Barbara Walters. (Photo © David Becker/Getty Images)
The fixation displayed by Ariel and the motley crew of wanna-be journalists (sans a countervailing sense of how McGregor and the UFC got to this point) was astounding to say the least. And no less astounding was Dana White’s sufferance of Ariel & The McGregor Nut-Huggers ….. The latter being a great name, BTW, for an itinerant band of sycophantic inksters. The Dana of old would have, after the second or third wave of perseverative badgering, told them to go f*ck themselves, or better still get a room in Iceland ….. with lots of rubber, lube and gas-station-dick-pills.
Filed under: MMA, Uncategorized, Ariel Helwani as the Baba Wawa of MMA Journalism, BNSG, Conor McGregor, MMA, MMA Journalism, Press, UFC, WME-IMG-UFC, Zuffa
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