Recently I wrote the first installment of my pet peeves about the MMA online scene. It can be found here. Consider this exhibit B to my fighter-writer interview relationship rant.
My newest example is the way many writers jump like fanboys to the defense of fighters whenever the legal system or state athletic commissions make any move where in they just don’t understand the fight game.
I’ll preface this by saying that this particular legal situation is over and charges were dropped. Din Thomas has been cleared, his students no money being officially taken and one of his students being an EMT. But we did not have any of this information the day he was arrested. It’s not that the legal system was completely right in the arrest and charges of Din Thomas in Florida. The Athletic Commission of California certainly wasn’t perfect in handling the case of Sean Sherk. But these fighters were not being persecuted unfairly or randomly and there were reasons in both cases that the stories were at the very least in shades of grey. We do have laws in this country that supersede MMA. We do have rules put together by state commissions for a reason.
Repeatedly I’ve read how the Din Thomas smoker fight situation was a laughable witch hunt. Someone must have been out to get him. Don’t they know these fighters need to train in real fight environments with fans? No, ‘they’ probably don’t because ‘they’ are to busy sorting out the legalities of what was going on when money was exchanged for people to come into a gym and watch unsanctioned fights. If you welcome state sanctioning then this is what happens. It doesn’t make Din Thomas a bad guy or even a criminal. It also doesn’t make him Robin Hood or unfairly scrutinized.
If you are the police and you hear that a fighter is holding unregulated fights at his gym for money, even if the tip is from a rival gym or something, you wouldn’t know that, and it’s your job to investigate. If you show up, as an officer of the law, and you see what appears to be something resembling this going on, it’s your job to investigate further. It doesn’t mean the Thomas is an unsafe lawbreaker, but things take an amount of time in the legal system. The facts would come out eventually, and the afternoon or day after the incident was certainly not enough time for fact finding and perspective from writers who declared this a miscarriage of justice while at the same time reporting the story as news. Frankly, even if you’re doing so in an op-ed, unless your very clearly defining your position up front, put disclaimers about what is alleged and what is fact at that moment with some unbiased perspective. I think its only slightly less stupid to say it as opinion.
I’ll finish up this rant next time regarding coverage of the California State Athletic Commission testing for Oxy and Ecstacy soon. Otherwise, I’ll try to touch on some positive stuff in the coming week to balance everything out.
e-mail John Philapavage at johnnyp@mmaopinion.com
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