Issue 077
July 2011
By Gareth A Davies, MMA and boxing correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, London.
Do you want to be a writer? Time to put it to the test with a version of ‘The Ultimate Writer.’ Whatever quixotic fantasies budding MMA writers out there may have, they ought to bear this in mind: as the sport eases itself into the mainstream, new writers are needed but they need to be qualified and experienced. MMA is bedeviled at present by citizen churnalism. Knee-jerk reactions and little research adorn a plethora of websites, all aboard the bandwagon.
An encyclopedic knowledge of the early cave dwellers in fight sports and minute details from UFC 1 onwards, or the earliest Pride event, does not a journalist make. Nor, indeed, do sweeping statements and pendulum opinions. They are as common as disputed decisions in fights.
Journalism is a profession. Trained journalists can turn their skills to different subjects and they know the scent of a story. Hunch plays a part, too. One of the most shocking aspects of MMA journalism is the rumor mill online. Yes, I know its modernism gives the sport a wonderfully viral Internet movement – and admittedly it is entertainingly fast at times – but there are aspects of MMA reporting which border on the absurd. Increasingly, I hear from fighters who have been driven to distraction by a journalist. But was the person sticking a Flip camera in his face really a journalist, or even a sports writer?
Chael Sonnen didn’t shock me this month when he told me his view of ‘journalists’ in MMA had changed radically over the last 12 months. Obviously, he was under scrutiny due to his high-profile fall-out with the Nevada State Athletic Commission after snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against Anderson Silva in Oakland last year. He expressed incredulity that highly regarded journalists within the sport were giving assessments of him on television and radio, yet they had not once called him to ask his side of the story. Schoolboy errors.
Like any other profession, it takes a period of apprenticeship. If you are wondering where this column is headed, consider the following. Hundreds if not thousands of young people are now obsessed with MMA, and especially the UFC. They have notions of writing about it. It is no exaggeration that I receive a steady stream of solicitations – I’ll guestimate around 10 a month – generally from recent university graduates either on Twitter (@GarethBOXUFC), Facebook or email, either offering their services to write or asking for advice.
It goes a little like this: “I have been reading your work for the last three years and I have just graduated from university with a law or business degree. I train MMA, I have a vast knowledge of MMA and I would like to carve a career writing about it. Can you give me any advice on any openings?” All laudable intentions. But the answer is a simple one. Qualify. Learn about journalism and it’s law, study (crucially) to the level where your written language is at the very least correctly written, and get yourself a traineeship. Writing on MMA is a byproduct of being a journalist. You do not become an MMA writer and thus a journalist.
Rule number one: If a budding writer says he/she will do it for nothing it hardly endears them to those of us who make a living from journalism. Websites which allow citizen journalism only reflect that. Half-baked pap. Or other sites simply reconstitute old material. If you don’t ever go to events how can that differ from the bods paying their bucks to watch it with you in 2D (or, now sometimes, 3D)?
Here’s the best advice I can give. It comes from the great journalist, essayist and poet Samuel Johnson, who lived in the 18th century. I use it as a credo. “Research meticulously. Simplify. Then exaggerate.” Now if that seems crass given what I’ve written already, it is a framework for telling stories. Fighters fascinate me. I like to get under their skin, explore their minds, develop long-term relationships. I’m drawn in by Forrest Griffin’s obsession with the writer Chuck Pahlaniuk and his interest in absurdist fiction; Chuck Liddell’s upbringing by his grandfather Charles, a deputy sheriff; Jake Shields’ adherence to veganism; or, as I happened upon last year, the brain operation involving an incision in a vein in Thiago Alves’ groin which saved a potentially life-threatening, career-ending condition inside his head.
The bottom line is that these are very tough men, addicted to training, who hit and get hit for a living in a steel cage where they learn to feel comfortable. We admire them. But we also want to humanize them. There are no more than a handful of journalists in MMA whose work I bookmark. Their efforts are more solid than expansive, but I am engaged by their steady drip-drip rather than any rash opinion.
There is an art to being close to fighters, yet detached, which you must be. I haven’t yet mastered it, in almost 20 years writing about fight sports. And in a small field like MMA, where you can’t afford to burn your bridges, the use of mechanisms to push buttons, gain opinions and quotes has to be subtle.
Empathy is my slide rule. When you criticize put yourself in the shoes of the fighter you are pricking. I want to know I can look him in the eye when I next see him, even discuss the point I might have made. Some websites out there are simply indulging in citizen churnalism. Said MMA aficionado sets up website ‘X’ designed at a cost of a couple of grand, churns out 30 stories a day, re-hashing stories being generated by other media outlets. The site then secures advertising on the basis of page impressions and hits. Journalism? Far from it.
MMA doesn’t need more fan-boys turned writers. It needs hacks. Hacks come at a sport with the necessary cynicism to bust open the big stories. I’m not saying that some websites aren’t hugely entertaining and informative. But some are dire. If we want better judging, higher salaries for fighters and greater insurance for them aren’t we all entitled to want the highest standards of journalism also?
