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By Frank Hyden, MMATorch contributor One of the aspects I've grown most tired of in MMA doesn't take place inside the octagon. It doesn't involve announcers or shill men or officials or anybody like that. No, this is entirely about the fighters themselves. Apparently, there are few fighters immune to this disease which has become the bane of my show-watching existence. The malady I speak of is the prefight, sitdown interview.
One of the reasons these interviews bother me so is that they're so predictable that I don't even need to listen to them to know what's being said. I can mute the television during one and give a verbatim recap more often than not. It's a lot of, "My standup is better, my grappling is better, my jiu-jitsu is better. I'm going to beat him in the 1st round." And the vast majority of fighters do this. It's obvious that they're being told to trash talk, I don't blame the promoters, but I most certainly blame the fighters for engaging in such tired drivel. It's like they're all reading off the same script. Of course Dana White is going to want a UFC fighter to talk smack about his opponent, he's a promoter and a shill man. His job is to try to get people interested and who doesn't like some good trash talk? But therein lies the problem, it's usually not good trash talk.
How many times can we hear the same old lines from fighters before we start tuning them out? Ever guy out there thinks his game is better than his opponent's game. That's fine, that's an athlete's mentality. We want our athletes to have that mindset, to aspire to be the best ever, because otherwise why bother? But the problem is that 90% of the fighters are reading that same cue card during these sitdown interviews. There's often no substance to the interviews because the guy is saying the same trite lines we've heard hundreds of times before.
One of the better things to come out of The Ultimate Fighter show is that we're allowed to learn more about the fighters themselves. We learn that this guy has a son who's sick or that guy has a wife that supported him for years as he pursued his dreams and who he now needs to support as she enters law school. We learn what makes these guys tick and what makes them human. Instead of blending in with every other fighter on the card, they achieve a certain sense of separation and uniqueness. Of course, that uniqueness is useless without talent but that goes without saying. Guys from TUF are more relatable than fighters we know little about to begin with and who then spend their sitdown interview spewing out the same tired junk the rest of the fighters say. Obviously a fighter thinks he's going to win everytime he steps into that octagon, I'm more interested in learning about what makes him tick and why he fights.
The best thing a fighter can do to get my attention is to talk about his reasons for fighting. I don't care about, "I'm going to submit him in the first round.". I care about hearing how he fights to support his family and how he used to work in a supermarket and had to make up excuses as to why he would come in with bruises and black eyes after fighting on an MMA card. Or how he had to juggle training with working full-time at a factory. I want to know more about a fighter before I can root for him.
Maybe it's the company's fault. Maybe the fighter sits there and talks for 20 minutes about his life and why he fights but the company chooses to only show the 2 minutes he spent regurgitating the cliches we've all heard before. But if that's really the case then people need to be fired. I don't think that's really the way it is, though. I think the fighters spend their time saying that stuff because they think that it's what we want to hear. Unfortunately, it's the opposite of what we want to hear. So we're all treated to interviews we already know by heart without even having seen the interviews before. I like when guys break from script and speak from the heart. I'm not asking for a profound speech, just a little variety would be nice.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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