Issue 059
February 2010
As one half of the UFC commentating team, Mike Goldberg is a face and voice familiar to fight fans around the world.
Leading Man
Mike Goldberg
Commentator
Since making his commentary debut at Ultimate Japan 12 years ago, he has provided the play-by-play on more than 100 events. A college hockey player, Goldberg started his commentating career in that sport calling games for local radio and television, but it wasn’t something he just drifted into; Goldberg knew from a young age what he wanted.
“Back in the eighth grade I was playing hockey and I was also a singer in a band. We went to the local TV-station for the Jerry Lewis Telethon, which raises money for muscular dystrophy, and we got to be the local act. So we sang and then I got to see the local news like, from the studio, and it hit me like, ‘This is what I want to do,’” he recalls.
“I went to college as a mass communications major, I was still playing hockey, started doing more and more radio and TV in college and here we are today. But I definitely knew as a young kid that some sort of TV or radio was what I wanted to do.” Having got his start, Goldberg covered everything from hockey to professional football and basketball. In 1997 he got a call asking if he would like to get involved in a new sport. He said yes, and in December of that year he found himself sitting in the commentary box for Ultimate Japan.
Despite at that point having no knowledge of the martial arts, Goldberg winged it. “I had the background as a broadcaster and I could follow the format, I could tell the story. If you give me some background or a good story, I can do that without messing it up. But the philosophy I used – and it’s a wise philosophy – was the old KISS: ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’. Don’t go in there and act like I knew every angle and strategy that there is in mixed martial arts.”
In fact, not knowing everything there is to know about MMA is something that Goldberg is frequently accused of even now. On any given day there is usually at least one thread about him on the leading Internet forums, berating him for asking “stupid” questions of his commentating partner Joe Rogan, but Goldberg finds it all quite funny.
“You know, it makes me laugh. They might be stupid questions to those guys who watch every day, but what about their buddy who is only watching his second fight? Isn’t that the same question that he just asked you, ‘Why is he doing this?’ It’s the same thing. I am big on the fact that as the play-by-play guy, you’re not the expert. The color commentator is the expert. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand it, but I don’t ever want to be on that soapbox of ‘What he should do here is…’ in a way that you would see Jack Nicklaus on TV talking about golf,” he explains.
“As the play-by-play guy I am the quarterback, I am going to set it up and pass the ball off,” he explains. “So to me they’re not stupid questions to somebody. I know the answer, but it’s my way of getting Joe into a subject matter which I think a lot of people at home might find interesting.”
In fact, Goldberg trains in the martial arts himself with respected instructors such as Marc Dellagrotte and Apollo Sebastian, so he has more than just theoretical knowledge of the shots he is calling. But he notes that his own training is mostly in stand-up, and observes that many fighters are similar. “If you look at Randy Couture, he is a wrestler at heart, Chuck Liddell is a kickboxer, BJ Penn is a BJJ black belt. They can do all the other things in MMA but they have a base in one style.”
For Goldberg, “The big difference in our sport over the next generation will be that 13-year-old kids walking into a gym for the first time are going to do jiu-jitsu, put the gloves on and box, then work on takedowns, then get the Thai pads out. These kids are going to grow up practicing everything at once, and that will make a world of difference.”
On top of that, the sport is growing at an exponential rate, perhaps thanks to those same 13-year-olds, and the UFC has never been more popular. How does Goldberg see the future for the company he calls home? “Our fans are very loyal, and going around the world; fighting is universal and we are just scratching the surface. We were reminded about the global potential of this thing when we returned to the UK and it is only going to get bigger. We have broken into Europe, we have got Australia and Abu Dhabi coming up – and I get to go along for the ride, which is pretty cool.”
