UFC
QUOTABLES: "Mayhem" Miller - "I wasted a good chunk of my career" with Showtime/CBS ban
May 3, 2011 - 8:55:43 PM QUOTABLES: "Mayhem" Miller - "I wasted a good chunk of my career" with Showtime/CBS ban

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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief

"All I knew is that I sat on the bench for a year. That's all I knew...I asked, and guess what? Nobody would tell me. This is a political environment. Nobody's going to tell you. They're just going to be cowards about it. That's the way of the world. Nobody's going to tell the crazy ultimate fighter guy to his face, 'Hey, screw you.' They're not going to do that...

Up until the last minute – up until it was apparent that they had no intention of fulfilling the contract – I was like, hey, I'm ready to fight. Let's fight. At the last moment, it looks as if, okay, they can't fulfill the contract. Now I fight in the UFC. ...I have no ill will towards anyone. If that's how they saw it, then that's how they saw it. If that's the case that I was really banned [from Showtime], then hey, it's not the first place I've been 86'd from...

Here I've been sitting on the bench. I've been training. I've been working hard and improving, but do you guys think I get some sort of severance package? Do you think I have Bully Beatdown billions? I don't, trust me. I sat around and wasted a good chunk of my career that I could have been making income and capitalizing on the fact that my body is great and I know how to fight... Maybe it was because I was the only guy who apologized and accepted the blame. I was the only guy who really apologized for it, and not this half-hearted thing where my manager's making me say I'm sorry. I was truly apologetic. That whole incident, I never expected anything like that to happen."

-Jason "Mayhem" Miller talks to MMAFighting.com about not knowing Showtime and CBS had banned him from their networks, leading to him being essentially frozen out of the remainder of his Strikeforce contract with no knowledge of the situation.

Penick's Analysis: This is just unacceptable on a number of levels. It's bad enough that an inordinate amount of the blame for the Nashville brawl on CBS went to Miller. Sure, he shouldn't have gotten in the cage, but he was the one that was jumped, by two of Strikeforce's Champions at the time, no less, and for him to be banned from the network while Nick Diaz would go on to headline three more Showtime events after the incident is ridiculous. For them to not even tell him he was banned from the network and that's why he wasn't getting offered fights is an even greater offense. If he would have known, he likely would have had a course of action available to him to get out of the contract early so he wasn't sitting on the sidelines while healthy and ready for action. He no longer has to worry about it now that he's back with the UFC, but this was ridiculous and unacceptable on the part of Showtime, CBS and Strikeforce.

[Mayhem Miller photo via MTV.com]