Latest MMA Media Watch Stories

When Kyle Maynard decided to try high school wrestling, plenty of people thought he couldn't do it because he was born with congenital amputation of both forearms and both lower legs. But Maynard, who didn't just compete but won most of his high school wrestling matches, showed that he could do it.

Once he was done with wrestling, Maynard decided to turn his attention to mixed martial arts, and then the attitude toward him changed: Not only did many people think he couldn't do it, but a lot of people thought he shouldn't do it, and that, if necessary, the authorities should step in to stop him from doing it.

Eventually Maynard did get his amateur MMA match (he lost by decision), and the route he traveled to get to that match is the subject of a new documentary, A Fighting Chance, which can be viewed in full here after the interview.

In an interview with MMAFighting.com below, Maynard explained why he wanted to fight and what's next in his life.

Newer fans of mixed martial arts know Jason "Mayhem" Miller as the goofy guy who hosts Bully Beatdown, not as a bully himself. Even when Miller instigated a brawl at the end of Strikeforce's last CBS show, it came across more like a prank gone bad than an attempt to pick a fight. And in the clip above, Miller decries Nick Diaz for making MMA fighters look like "thugs."

But it wasn't that long ago that Miller had a reputation as one of the thugs in MMA. He was placed on probation for beating someone up in a bar and later charged (and acquitted) with first-degree burglary. Miller doesn't talk about that part of his past very often, but he opens up about it to Michael Schiavello in an interview that will air on HDNet Friday night.

On Saturday I praised K-1 announcers Michael Schiavello and Mike Kogan for their candor in calling the recent Kazuyuki Miyata vs. Kazuhisa Watanabe fight, a fight that wasn't on par with the caliber of kickboxing that fans have come to expect from K-1.

Now Miyata has responded, and he's not pleased with being called out.

"K-1 USA's commentator Mike Kogan insulted me," Miyata wrote on his blog, as translated by MMA Fighting's Japan correspondent, Daniel Herbertson. "He knows me but he's still saying these kinds of things about me?"

One of the problems that plagues combat sports broadcasting is that the television announcers are so closely aligned with the promotions whose fights they call that the broadcasters often start to sound like promoters themselves. The fans are told that every fight they're watching is great, even if their two eyes tell them something different.

That's why Michael Schiavello and Mike Kogan deserve a ton of credit for the way they called the Kazuyuki Miyata vs. Kazuhisa Watanabe K-1 World MAX tournament fight that aired on HDNet Friday.

Strikeforce fighter Jason Mayhem Miller thinks CBS announcer Gus Johnson is an "idiot" for his comments at the end of the April Strikeforce show, and UFC announcer Joe Rogan agrees with that assessment.

In a wide-ranging discussion on Rogan's UStream show, Miller and Rogan expressed their agreement with what many MMA fans said immediately following the CBS broadcast: Johnson made a bad situation even worse by describing the brawl following the main event as the kind of thing that just sometimes happens in MMA.

Miller, who provoked the brawl that broke out in the cage by confronting Jake Shields following his victory in the main event, said that as he was being hit by Shields' entourage, "The freaking idiot Gus Johnson goes, 'Gentlemen, this is national television.' I'm like, 'Ha ha, no s**t'."

Sylvester Stallone's upcoming movie The Expendables features an all-star cast of Hollywood tough guys including Stallone himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Terry Crews, and Stone Cold Steve Austin. But Stallone says that when the whole cast got together, there was no question who the toughest guy in the room was: Randy Couture.

Talking to David Letterman on Monday night, Stallone talked up Couture as the guy who made the other guys uncomfortable during the fight scenes, and Letterman showed a healthy respect and admiration for Couture's accomplishments in the cage.

The United States MMA calendar has been relatively quiet this month, but that doesn't mean referee Dan Miragliotta isn't keeping busy.

"Big Dan" will reprise his role as the referee on "Ultimate Mustache Fighter" on the Thursday night (really Friday Morning) edition of NBC's Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

A week after leaving his job working in the production of UFC broadcasts, jiu jitsu instructor Eddie Bravo says he expects to get back to work for the UFC.

Bravo did not work in the UFC production truck at UFC 116, instead choosing to corner George Sotiropoulos. But Bravo says there were never any hard feelings between himself and UFC President Dana White, and he says that the UFC will bring him back for fight cards when he's not cornering fighters, because the quality of the production suffered in his absence.

UFC lightweight Kenny Florian is rapidly turning into one of the best analysts in mixed martial arts. Over the weekend he called both the Ultimate Fighter Finale on Spike and WEC 49 on Versus, and in both broadcasts he showed off his technical knowledge of MMA as well as an ability to clearly articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the fighters he was watching.

But Florian, who also works as an analyst on ESPN's MMA Live, found a subject this week that he couldn't explore in any real depth: Saturday night's fight between Cris Cyborg and Jan Finney.

One of the dilemmas that increasingly seems to frustrate both MMA promoters and fans is the refusal of friends and teammates to fight each other. The guys who train with Greg Jackson don't want to fight each other. The guys who train at American Kickboxing Academy don't want to fight each other. The guys who train at Black House don't want to fight each other. Babalu Sobral says he doesn't want the Strikeforce light heavyweight title fight he just earned because he's friends with the champion, Mo Lawal. And so on.

That's why it was nice to read, in Jake Rossen's expansive look at the 2000 Pride openweight tournament, the words of Mark Coleman on the subject.

Despite the fact that UFC programming was banned from German television earlier this year, Dana White said after UFC 114 that the organization has not given up on the market and expects to bring another live event to Germany sooner rather than later.

"We are doing a show," White said. " Listen, one thing we don't do is we don't back down, we don't curl up and climb into the closet when things don't go good. We're going to come out, guns a-blazing, we're going to keep going.

"Again, our job is the build the sport and we aren't going to stop. Not getting TV isn't going to stop us."

UFC 99 was held in Germany last June. The Bavarian state office for new media (BLM) announced in March that UFC programming was banned from German airwaves.

Watch below as White discusses the UFC's future in Germany.

The MMA media world has been abuzz this week about something UFC President Dana White said on Bill Simmons' podcast last week, and while most members of the MMA media have been criticizing White for what he said, I'd like to take a moment to criticize Simmons for what he didn't say.