UPSTARTED

Writing about fighting by Josh Rosenblatt.

[joshrosenblatt]

The Dream of Being Knocked Out by a UFC Fighter

British mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter winner Ross “The Real Deal” Pearson is busy training for his upcoming fight with fellow Ultimate Fighter winner, and famously unhinged person, Diego Sanchez, and part of that training, apparently, involves posting videos of himself knocking out people who are not Diego Sanchez in the gym. I’m not entirely sure why Pearson posted this video — As a joke? As a lark? As an admission of guilt? As a plea for forgiveness? As a warning to Sanchez? Who can say? Maybe it’s just because we live in a time when not posting video footage of yourself on the Internet is considered the odder decision.

But Pearson’s motivations are a lot less interesting to me than what it must be like to be the man on the receiving end of that kick. As a longtime gym-goer who has been in countless sparring matches, several of which ended with me rolling around helplessly on the ground after a shot to the head or body, I can tell you that after a while all the experiences start to blur together until you can’t differentiate one near-knockout from another. Now, you might argue that my inability to distinguish between head injuries is a result of those head injuries, and you may be right, but I think it’s just that, when done enough, sparring, like everything else in this world, becomes routine. Don’t doubt that you can sleepwalk your way through sparring just like you can sleepwalk your way through anything else in this life (work, sex, sleeping, walking). And when things become too routine, we all need something to shake us out of our near-slumber, to remind us that we’re alive, that we still have blood in our veins, and that wondrous things can happen from time to time.

Which is why, despite the fact that the man Ross Pearson is knocking out on that video is now famous as the man who was knocked out by Ross Pearson on video, I still envy him. What a thrill it must have been to get knocked cold by an honest-to-goodness UFC fighter. The names and faces of the men and women I’ve sparred over the years have blurred together in their anonymity and their lack of celebrity, but a kick to the head from a UFC star would be a singular experience on par with any 10-year-old girl’s tale of chasing down the members of One Direction at a shopping mall, lust and murder in their eyes. It would be a life-defining brush with fame.

I hate to admit it, but this might be my one celebrity thing. I don’t care about meeting movie stars or rock stars or even MMA stars. I have no desire to dine with them or gaze at them or dream that we'll be friends. Nothing in this world sounds more ridiculous. But, oh, to get knocked out by a UFC star in a sanctioned sparring environment -- I could dine out on that story for years. I’d tell everyone I knew, even those (especially those) who didn't know who I was talking about and couldn’t understand the thrill of the truth that I would know — that in order to get knocked out by a UFC fighter you first have to summon the courage to spar with a UFC fighter. Knowing that would be all the validation I’d need in this world. I wouldn’t even ask for an autograph once I regained consciousness. 

[joshrosenblatt]

Matt Brown Wants to Fight Nick Diaz, Which Means Everything's Officially Right With the World

Fresh off his victory over Erick Silva last weekend, Matt Brown has announced that he would like to fight Nick Diaz. 

All the 38 years of my life up to this point have been motivated almost entirely by my desires, but I can say with confidence that I have never wanted in my life as much as I want a fight between Matt Brown and Nick Diaz. A whole lifetime of perfect birthday gifts couldn’t equal the kind of joy that fight would produce in me, no art could fill my soul with more longing, no music could hope to penetrate my heart with more accuracy, no romantic love could dream of enlivening my spirit with happier song. It’s all I want for Christmas. I believe it’s all Jesus wants for Christmas. I believe it’s all anyone should want for Christmas. 

People being people, and me being me, there’s a good chance my overpowering thrill at the thought of a Brown-Diaz fight has a lot to do with its improbability. Things we can’t have always, always sound better than the things we can; that’s the one consistent truth I’ve found in this world. And since Brown is coming off the biggest win of his career and will likely next be matched up with someone in the top five of the UFC welterweight division, and since Nick Diaz is not only not in the top five of the UFC welterweight division, he’s not even in the UFC anymore, the chances of this fight happening are slim slim slim. Still, that Matt Brown even put it out there is enough to give MMA fans like me something to hope for, and all we can ask for in this life is something to hope for. The realization of most hopes is tinged with disappointment and regret, but a hope alone — simply the possibility, the gilded maybe — why, that can live forever and unblemished in the imagination: a perfect dream in an imperfect world. We have enough of reality and dashed expectations; having something simply to dream on, to believe in, and to create perfectly in the Octagon of our minds — that is something truly worthwhile. In the wonderful, nebulous world of possible future matchmaking, every fight is a Platonic ideal and a means of transportation — out of the everyday, the drab, the dreary, the actual. 

So who would win in this idealized, perfectly spiritual fight between Matt Brown and Nick Diaz — this fight that would last 10 rounds during which neither man would tire nor cease from looking for knockouts and submissions? I’m not usually one for predictions, but these are special circumstances, and I'll have to go with Matt Brown. In the world of professional cage-fighting, when all other things are equal — skills and endurance and toughness and will — I’m going to take the guy who brushed up against death. Nick Diaz may be the toughest and best man in the history of the world, but even he never tasted the dark waters and managed to fight his way back to the light. Matt Brown did, and I don't know if there's a defense against that kind of thing. 

[joshrosenblatt]

Bas Rutten Calls Jon Jones a Dirty Fighter, and He Probably Won’t Be the Last

No one loves MMA more than Bas Rutten. I write about MMA for a living and I could never hope to love it as much as Rutten does. “El Guapo” has been around the sport since the beginning, since before it was a sport, since before it was even called “MMA.” He’s been a fighter and a commentator and an analyst and a raconteur and a Hollywood ambassador and a late-night pitchman. He’s the height of MMA affability, the sport’s greatest cheerleader. For Bas Rutten to say anything negative about MMA means something must actually be wrong. Which is why ears all over the MMA world pricked up the other day when Rutten called UFC superstar Jon Jones "dirty" — the most notorious and scandalous word one could ever use to describe a fighter — on television. 

“He’s a very calm, relaxed, methodical fighter, and because he is that, I have to say — I’m sorry I have to say — Yes, then it’s a dirty fighter,” Rutten said on Inside MMA. “He knows exactly what he’s doing at any given time, and his fingers were definitely in [Glover Teixeira’s] face.”

Rutten was referring to Jones’ recent light heavyweight title defense against Brazilian Glover Teixeira, a fight Jones dominated with bruising inside punches, elbows to the faces, arm cranks … and more than one illegal eye poke. 

Eye pokes are like kryptonite to a mixed martial artist, much more so than elbows and arm cranks. Elbows can be blocked and arm cranks can be weathered and escaped. Eyes can’t be defended, and (try as some might) blindness can’t be fought through. Eye pokes play as much on the mind as they do the body. They mess with a fighter’s confidence. And without confidence a fighter is nothing — just a bunch of muscles and training and little else. The thing about mixed martial arts is that even with all the knees, kicks, punches, chokes, and leg locks, it’s still the most delicate interactions between the most delicate body parts that fighters fear the most.

Which is probably why fighters are so reluctant to accuse other fighters of throwing eye pokes intentionally. Every fighter in the world has been on the receiving end of one at some point in their career -- felt the temporary blindness, the sense of helplessness and dread, the sudden fear that such a small act might lead to a doctor calling off a fight, bruising both the fighter’s record and reputation. No fighter wants to lose by doctor’s stoppage because no fighter wants to believe his body can’t take all the punishment that can be thrown at it. And the sheer delicacy of the eye poke makes the doctor’s stoppage that much more humiliating: It messes with a fighter’s reputation for toughness, for invincibility, without which a fighter can deteriorate into a psychological mess. So most fighters and coaches and referees take other fighters at their word and write off finger pokes as an unfortunate but unintentional reality of the fight game, hardly able to believe that another fighter would deliberately do something so awful to one of his own. 

Recently, though, people have begun to question Jones’ repeated use of finger pokes and started to suspect that his are something other than unintentional. Theories are spreading around the MMA world that he and his coaches are slipping a few in when they can, giving an already dominant fighter an unfair advantage by preying on the sport’s institutional reluctance to believe anyone who fights for a living would stoop so low. But following Jones’ victory over Teixeira last month — a fight in which Jones received two warnings from referee Dan Miragliotta but no point deduction — what had previously been spoken of only in hushed tones has started to grow into a scandal.

So far Jones has blown off the criticism he’s been getting, mocking his accusers on social media (one of his new favorite pastimes), but he may need to start worrying now that Rutten is doubting him. Rutten holds a special place in the MMA imagination, and he’s not one to speak ill of any part of the sport without reason. MMA fighters may be the toughest people on the planet but there are some things no person can stand up to for long -- the worst being the growing, escalating, swelling, and eventually swamping tide of public opinion. Forget the eyes — where we’re most vulnerable is our reputations. 

Jones has to worry that Rutten is the beginning of an avalanche of public scrutiny and skepticism and the first step on the path toward a hardening of conventional wisdom against him. Accusations like these have a habit of taking on a life of their own; rumors becomes truth simply because enough people are repeating them. And this is a particularly delicate situation, considering the rather precarious role MMA plays in the public imagination and the rather ambivalent role Jones plays in MMA (one half endorsement-fueled superstar, the other "Man Fans Love to Hate"): Being known as a heel is one thing; being known as a cheater can hurt a fighter's bottom line. These whisperings may not be fair, but if accepted opinion can topple presidents and prime ministers, just imagine what it could do to a lowly workaday cage-fighter. 

[joshrosenblatt]

Only Pat Barry Knows How Much Is Too Much

It’s a cliché in the world of combat sports that you can’t make a fighter stop fighting, that a fighter fights for the same reason a dancer dances or a poet writes: because that’s who he is. Attempting to keep a fighter from a ring or a cage, especially one suffering at the tail end of a career, may be done for all the right reasons, but even good intentions can be disastrous when they’re used to justify the plucking away of life from a life. Then again, not saying something is pretty awful, too. It’s all a mess, I guess — in the world of fighting, "concern" covers all manner of sins. 

Last weekend former UFC heavyweight Pat Barry returned to kickboxing after an up-and-down career as a mixed martial artist and promptly got knocked out by the relatively unknown Zack Mwekassa. That knockout followed the two knockouts that ended Barry’s MMA career last year, the first to Shawn Jordan in June, the second to Soa Palelei in December. Count in the three knockout losses Barry suffered in 2011 and 2012, and it’s not surprising that people have started calling on the 34-year-old to retire. This week, UFC President Dana White told reporters that even former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar, a former teammate of Barry’s who saw the writing on the wall of his own career after back-to-back beatings at the hands of Cain Velasquez and Alistair Overeem, had joined the chorus. 

"Brock Lesnar called me and begged me to make [Barry] retire," White said Saturday. "He said, 'I don't consider too many people my friend and I consider Pat Barry a friend. Dana, you've got to get this guy to retire.' I said, ‘Listen, he's a grown man, Brock. What am I going to do?' There's only so much I can do."

White’s right, of course, as morbid as it may sound that the hand’s of the world’s biggest MMA promoter are tied when it comes to getting one of his former fighters to stop ruining himself: Pat Barry is in charge of Pat Barry, and the sad fact is that as long as Pat Barry wants to fight and as long as Pat Barry’s name can be used to sell tickets, there will be a fighting promotion out there willing to put him in the ring or the cage, no matter how many knockouts he’s suffered.

And besides, Barry probably wants to keep on fighting, despite it all. If the cliché is true, and fighter’s simply are and fighters simply fight, than one can understand a fighter’s reluctance to quit in the face of repeated injuries, concussions, and losses. It’s not just pride, and it’s just not addiction to a feeling — the need for the extremity of an experience — and it’s not even the need to make a living. The real issue, I imagine, when a fighter has come to the limits of his abilities and entered the punching bag phase of his career (as he inevitably will) is an existential one, or rather the existential one — where does our identity come from, and what does one do when one’s identity is wrapped up in one’s occupation? And is sacrificing one’s health in the search for identity in this world really a sacrifice at all?

Fighters deal with that question every day of their lives, whether they know it or not. It's not just the end-of-career knockouts that ruin a fighter’s brain. All that damage is cumulative, and fighters spend half their waking hours taking shots to the head. Then again, great pianists and painters, locked away in their practice rooms and their studios for 10 hours a day, everyday, for their entire lives, are probably doing irreparable damage to the parts of their brains that are activated by social interactions. In fact, you could argue that it’s the lust for greatness that’s actually the damaging thing here — that the desire to be the best in the world at something is a compulsion and a pathology, and that those who become truly great (at sports or music or math or writing or whatever) are damaged souls doomed to living half-lives.

A wise man may have said, ”The better part of valor is discretion,” but an equally wise man once said,” Know thyself.” And who are we to say what Pat Barry should or shouldn’t do with his body and his brain? Who is Brock Lesnar to say? Who is Dana White? I don’t know Pat Barry, but I can imagine that the dual pulls of the quest for identity on the one hand and the fear over spending the rest of your life not doing the thing you’ve spent your entire life doing on the other would make retirement a nearly impossible decision. When forced to choose between physical damage and existential collapse, I can’t imagine I wouldn’t go for physical damage every time. 

[joshrosenblatt]

Nate Diaz Gets Removed From the UFC Lightweight Rankings, and the World Gets Just a Little Lousier

Pro-Russian militias are kidnapping reporters in Eastern Ukraine, the White House just released a report stating that the effects of manmade global warming are irrefutable and dire, and the Supreme Court has decided that it’s perfectly fine for a city council meeting in America to open with a prayer to Jesus. And now, to top things off, Nate Diaz has been taken off the official UFC lightweight rankings. Everything everywhere is awful.

With all due respect to the 15 fighters on this list (all of whom are fantastic and delightful and deserve everything they have), a list of the greatest fighters in the world at 155 pounds that doesn’t feature Nate Diaz isn’t just a joke; it’s an affront. To truth, to decency, to the gods, whatever. I understand that Diaz has been battling with the UFC ever since President Dana White claimed on Twitter in January that Diaz had turned down a fight with current number 4 Khabib Nurmagomedov (implying that Diaz was scared to take the fight) and Diaz claimed on Twitter that Dana White and the UFC (and I’m paraphrasing here, but just barely) could go fuck themselves. But surely both parties can find a way to work things out, right? 

According to Diaz’s manager, Mike Kogan, his fighter just wanted to renegotiate his contract after beating up Gray Maynard (who, you’ll notice, is currently ranked number 8 on the list that Nate Diaz is not ranked on at all) two months earlier. And also Nate Diaz is Nate Diaz, and Nate Diaz is not known for swallowing slights, even from his boss, or for letting rumors spread that he's soft. So what was the UFC expecting Diaz to do when word starting getting around that he had turned down a fight? Sit at home reading while the storm blew offer? Respectfully explain his side of the story on a sports panel show? That’s like asking the tide not to come in or expecting the sun not to rise in the east.

I guess what happened is that contract negotiations between the fighter and the promotion finally got so bad that the UFC was forced to remove Diaz from their list of “active fighters,” thereby making him ineligible to be ranked. Rules are rules, but christ, can’t we make an exception here? Shouldn’t there be a "Diaz Caveat" to all MMA rankings until both Nate and his big brother, Nick, are dead and buried? Can't we all get on board with the idea that a Diaz-less MMA universe would be a dark and joyless place? After all, the goal of any sports organization is to traffic in distraction and escape; to make us believe in the possibility of something magical happening (like our team winning a championship or an athlete pulling off some previously unimaginable physical feat); to provide us a way to get through the drudgery of our daily lives by letting us exist, at least for a time, in the realm of the fantastic, where anything can happen; by gifting us a world of infinite possibilities.  

And who wants to live in an MMA world that eliminates the possibility of the Diaz brothers? 

It may be time to start a petition. 

[joshrosenblatt]

By Criticizing 'The Ultimate Fighter,' Ronda Rousey May Have Turned Herself Into an MMA Liberator

In the up-and-down 20-year history of the UFC there is one indisputable Moment — the time when everything seemed to finally come together and a brutish freakshow with a dodgy past and a questionable future broke out at last into the rarefied air of mainstream cultural acceptance. I’m talking, of course, of the finals of the first season of The Ultimate Fighter in 2005, when light heavyweights Stefan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin fought a fight that was so compelling that UFC officials were actually able to watch their ratings going up in real time over the course of its 15 minutes. By the time the fight was over, the UFC was no longer a fringe organization clinging onto its one last desperate attempt at financial and cultural solvency. It was now a player. Everything since — the TV deals, the celebrity fans, the crossover stars — can be traced back to that April night nine years ago. UFC President Dana White has called it “the most important fight in UFC history,” and it will never lose that title. A single fight can only pull an entire promotion out of a pit once. 

Now 19 seasons old, The Ultimate Fighter is no longer the cultural phenomenon it once was. MMA is big enough now, its scouting system so firmly entrenched and “minor-league” ecosystem so vast, that it’s a rare fighter who has to settle for participating on the show who is actually good enough to last in the UFC. As with all reality shows, the TUF format has grown stale, its dramas prefabricated. Still, though the show may have lost some of its relevance, it still holds a gilded place in the promotion’s history — birthplace of the Moment, something not to be messed with or maligned.   

Which makes UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey’s recent negative comments about the show kind of shocking. Speaking Monday to Canadian Press, Rousey, who was a famously unhappy coach on season 18 of the show, said she no longer even bothers watching. 

“I don’t watch The Ultimate Fighter now that I know how much bullshit is in it,” Rousey said. “I don’t support it. I used to watch it all the time. Now I won’t watch it.”

During her time on The Ultimate Fighter, Rousey famously butted heads with the show’s producers, accusing them of ginning up controversy between her and rival coach Miesha Tate and editing the show in such a way that she came out looking like the villain.

“[T]hey treated us like we were Real Housewives of Atlanta and not elite athletes that should be respected,” Rousey said. “And I don’t support people like that so I don’t watch the show anymore.”

While it’s not surprising that Rousey would feel this way, it is surprising that she feels free to say that her disaffection with her experience has spread to the show as a whole, that she — arguably the face of the UFC and its biggest-ever star — has come to mistrust, even hate, the organization’s sentimental favorite. 

Don’t get me wrong: Other UFC fighters have complained about the promotion before — about fighter pay, matchmaking, health benefits, etc. — but usually they were disgruntled fighters at the tail end of their UFC careers, middle-tier guys whose place in the organization was precarious regardless of whether they opened their mouths or not, or Nick Diaz. And no one ever spoke ill of The Ultimate Fighter. Oh, some participants complained — about living in the house, about training every day, about being cut off from women for weeks on end — but they wouldn’t dare say a word about the phenomenon itself. To do so would be to stick your thumb in the eye of the promotion you’ve waited your whole life to be a part of. The UFC does not suffers criticism gladly, especially not of the Moment, that greatest and most cherished of all nights in the UFC biography.

But Rousey’s break from convention may just signal a new reality in the UFC, one similar to the realities other sports and even Hollywood now exist in. At some point the stars in those worlds realized the strength of their positions and broke free of the established power structure. In Hollywood that meant busting up the old studio system, where actors were just contract players obligated to star in the movies made by the studios they were signed to, regardless of personal preference. And in other pro sports, it was the rise of free agency that realigned the balance of power far more in favor of players than it had ever been. Huge contracts, stronger unions, and player autonomy followed.

Could it be that we’re seeing something similar start to happen in the UFC, that the rise of Ronda Rousey to unprecedented levels of fame (magazine covers, starring roles in major Hollywood movies, appearances on late night talk shows) has decreased the UFC's leverage even as its increased its profile? Has there been fundamental shift in the balance of power between labor and management — not through the creation of a union or as a result of a court case — but as a result of the rise of a single, stubborn, opinionated fighter whose clout and fame extend beyond even those of her bosses?

It kind of seems like it. Dana White, a man with a notorious hair-trigger temper when it comes to his fighter’s doing what he perceives to be damage to the UFC brand, responded to Rousey’s criticism of The Ultimate Fighter with uncharacteristic reserve, even resignation. “Not everyone is crazy with reality TV and it’s no secret that Ronda butted heads with people in production and on the show,” White told Canadian Press. “You can’t change her mind, that’s the way she feels.”

That’s true, of course. Ronda Rousey has made her name nearly as much on her unfiltered opinions as her arm bars, but the UFC if full of opinionated fighters, and White has never had any problem changing their minds or telling them how they feel. What’s different here is that not only are the UFC and Dana White apparently allowing Rousey to speak ill of their golden child, but, more importantly, Rousey must have sensed that they would allow her to do so; she must have a felt the change in the air away from the management-dominant model of the past and current UFC and toward a new star-power model. Rousey, it seems, called the UFC’s bluff and the UFC backed down. I can’t say for sure but I wouldn’t doubt if we one day look back to Monday’s interview in Canadian Press as the start of a shift in the way business is done in the increasingly mainstream world of MMA. Here we thought it would take a fighter’s union to realign the balance of power in the sport when in reality all it took was that most American of power-shifting phenomena: one extremely famous, wealthy celebrity recognizing her place in the world and realizing she know longer has to give a shit about what her bosses think.

[joshrosenblatt]

Josh Thomson and the Agony of Social Media

We live in an age of self-promotion -- when the things we've done mean less than our ability to draw attention to them. 

Still, when I'm feeling charitable I try not to judge. In the vast void of the universe, can we really be faulted for seeking out means to validate our  existences? In some ways, the proliferation of Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr have helped us answer those most fundamental of philosophic quandaries: Am I here? Was I here? And what does it matter? It may seem like the height of insignificance to post a paragraph about a recent meal or a least favorite sitcom episode, but it's hard to find fault with any human being looking for confirmation of his/her existence in the eyes of his fellow human beings and the cosmos at large. To do so would be to take issue with the entirety of human philosophical, artistic, and political history.  

Still, this is me giving Twitter and Facebook a lot of credit. It's one thing to want to validate your existence; it's another thing to celebrate it above everyone else's. That we live in a age of perpetual self-promotion also means that we live in an age of perpetual self-congratulation and self-importance. The desire to broadcast ourselves to the world has metastasized into the far more bizarre and delusional belief that what we broadcast is, and should be, important to the world. There's something wonderful and absurd about sending out little messages and pictures and gifs into the universe with a winking acknowledgement that they don't mean anything, that their very insignificance is a reflection of the tragic-comic human condition. But there's something horrid and beastly and distorted about sending out little messages into the world and actually believing people should care. That, to me, seems like not only the height of delusion but a spit in the face of the whole delightfully ridiculous human experiment. You have to have a sense of humor about your inconsequence.

This modern problem is only compounded when the people sending the messages have a valid reason for believing those messages actually do matter, which is the case in the world of MMA, where each fighter is essentially a free agent when it comes to marketing. Win all the fights you want, but just ask UFC President Dana White and he'll tell you: Not backing up your actions with talk (an ironic reversal of a common phrase, especially in the world of fighting) is a great way to get ignored (just ask light heavyweight Phil Davis). Fighters concerned with supplying themselves and their loved ones with the finer things in life -- things like food and a house -- know by this point and in this age that success doesn't happen in a vacuum; it has to be manufactured from within and without; it has to be cultivated and watered and spoken of early and often. It has to be advertised and celebrated by the very person achieving the success. Put another way, and to have my way with a line from Shakespeare, Actions without words never to heaven go.

Which creates something of a predicament for most fighters, many of whom are trained in the art of punching and choking people, not in the art of insulting them via social media in such a way as to create commercial demand. Most fighters are relatively solitary creatures, toiling away for years and years in their gyms, crafting their skills quietly, like monks or musicians. To expect them to then turn around and master the art of short-form rhetoric and antagonistic oratory after all those years of learning to speak primarily with their bodies may be too much to ask.

Which is why it should come as no surprise that so many of them are so lousy at it. Or why they (and, to be fair, many others out there who aren't fighters as well) so often stumble over themselves trying. The Twittersphere is a dangerous place, where one false move, one misspelled word, one ill-advised thought can bring down CEOs, much less aspiring cage-fighters. The road is long and dark and filled with obstacles, and the world is just waiting for you to trip up. Because in an age of self-congratulation and self-promotion, the inevitable favorite past-time is bound to delighting in the self-destruction of others.

Those who live by the tweet die by the tweet, and the only tool anyone has found to try and save themselves in the court of public opinion (aside from pure defiance) is the meager and totally unconvincing defense that a phone has been stolen or an account hacked. UFC pound-for-pound great Jon Jones tried this approach recently when he sent homophobic messages to some of his online antagonizers, and it didn't work. Because it never does, not for anyone. Athletes, actors, politicians, and mere mortals have all tried this defense and it has gotten them nowhere. Never has a strategy been so historical unsuccessful and yet so consistently called upon in moments of catastrophe. 

Yet here was UFC lightweight contender Josh Thomson getting into hot water yesterday for sending out a tweet mocking one Diaz brother while calling out the other:

Followed by the inevitable claims to innocence and a stolen phone:

That Thomson's phone was stolen and then used is possible, I suppose, but hardly likely. And more importantly, too late in the game to be believed. At this point, it's simply understood that crying "hack" or "stolen" is the knee-jerk reaction to getting called out for a social media faux-pas, the same way a politician afraid of either losing an upcoming election or of having a scandal exposed will say that he is retiring to spend more time with his family. There may be politicians out there who want to spend more time with their kids, but no one believes them when they say it. 

No surprise then that the Diaz brother Thomson knocked out, Nate, was so quick to express his skepticism, and ours:

Which just goes to illustrate how hopeless Thomson's claims to innocence are: Even if everything he said was true and his phone had been snatched away at dinner by someone with an intimate knowledge of his career and the intricacies of UFC matchmaking, it doesn't matter. The twin burdens of our social media past and our social media present were conspiring against him; no one would ever believe his protests because we've heard them all before, and our greatest delight has become watching our heroes stumble in the virtual world. Thomson's fate was sealed as soon as he sent that apology tweet; his agony was simply waiting around like a sacrificial lamb to be reduced to so many hashtags.