Montreal-born, deeply empathic broadcaster has learned to handle the low blows of the sport’s scorn but is also comfortable branching out to a high-brow interview
The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani
It was a rousing exchange, and for fans of Helwani, a familiar one. He and White, whose UFC is the sport’s dominant promotion company, have been scrapping for a long time. Still, though he recognizes those moments are viral catnip for his fans, he’s also trying to move beyond incendiary content and toward something more meaningful.
A few days earlier, the fighter Jeff Molina had given an exclusive interview to Helwani about being outed as bisexual. Alexa Grasso cried when she talked to Helwani about her shocking upset win over Valentina Shevchenko. Leon Edwards wept in his first interview with Helwani after winning the UFC welterweight title last year.
At the time, there weren’t many reporters with Helwani’s classical training and journalistic rigour covering the sport.– a nod to the original home of the Montreal Expos – and began blogging about MMA, and doing video interviews with fighters. In 2009, he launchedas a video and audio show on AOL. Two years later, Helwani landed a gig as an MMA reporter for Fox Sports: The big time, but a poisoned chalice, because his salary was paid by the parent company of UFC.
He says he’s pleased with how the show went, though he admits, “I’ve never left the show thinking, like, ‘I nailed that.’” And it hurt when he posted the lineup of guests in the morning and haters filled the comments. He takes that criticism personally, because he’s the one who books all of the guests, “and I think long and hard about what would make the best show.”
In June, 2016, while covering UFC 199 in Inglewood, Calif., Helwani broke the news that Brock Lesnar, who was then contracted to the WWE, would be in a featured fight on the next UFC card. Dana White had planned to make a splash with the news, and was incensed that he had been scooped. He had Helwani and two colleagues removed from the event venue, and declared they would be “banned for life.” White told him, “We just put a bullet in your head. Your career is done.
It was one of those gigs that changed everything. In February, 2021, he got the call to work sidelines for a game between the Milwaukee Bucks and Indiana Pacers. “My contract was coming up, so I was trying to say yes to everything, because I thought I’d re-sign,” he explains. But he was “paralyzed by anxiety.” He, his wife, three kids, and their golden doodle Matcha had spent 11 months together, and he was terrified of leaving. COVID-19 vaccines were not yet widely available.
He began talking to Vox about returning to his old home. “This place makes me happy,” he said. But rather than tie himself to just one company, he realized there was political and financial capital to be found in diversifying, so he wouldn’t be beholden to any single entity. He returned to Vox and, and signed deals with other companies, too: a podcast for Spotify, hosting boxing events, covering WWE for BT Sport including this weekend’s Wrestlemania in California.
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