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Mary Firth, the roaring girl who drank, brawled, committed crimes, and wore pants, 1627
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The way Dustin Poirier put it seemed to surprise many people. Maybe it’s because of who he is, which is to say one of the most successful and seemingly levelheaded fighters still active in the sport, the kind of guy who seems to always have it together. Or maybe it was because of how he put it in an interview with Ariel Helwani on “The MMA Hour” earlier this week.In the aftermath of his knockout loss to Justin Gaethje last year, Poirier said, he slipped into a “darkness” that consumed his thoughts, causing genuine concern for his own well-being.“The world doesn’t know, but the people close to me know,” Poirier said. “I went through some real mental struggles.”
This echoed what we heard from former UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski just a few months ago. Trying to explain why he accepted a short-notice fight up a weight class against an opponent who’d already beaten him once, Volkanovski explained that he’d been struggling mentally and hoped booking a fight would help.“For some reason, when I wasn't fighting or in camp or keeping busy, I was just doing my head in,” Volkanovski said at the time.Stick around this sport long enough and you’ll realize this is a recurring theme. Those periods after each fight, whether they win or lose, can be hard on fighters. There are several very good reasons for this, just like there are several reasons why active fighters aren’t eager to admit to struggling with it. (Just look up some of the reactions from peers to Volkanovski’s admission, for instance.)
I was reminded of this while asking around among fighters this week. Many of those still making their way in the sport didn’t want to discuss the bouts of post-fight depression. They worried fans or fellow fighters might use it against them in the future. Then I asked Chael Sonnen, half-expecting to get some tough guy answer in keeping with his public persona.
“OMG, post-fight depression is very real,” Sonnen wrote back. “I experienced it every time, and I faked my way through it because I thought it was my dirty secret.”What made him realize he wasn’t alone, Sonnen said, was a discussion with a former opponent named Brian Stann, who explained it in a way that made sense. It also helped him realize he wasn’t alone in struggling with it.Stann may be one of the most all-around remarkable individuals to ever fight in the UFC. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he played linebacker on the Midshipmen football team, Stann received the Silver Star for valor in combat while serving in Iraq.Stann entered the UFC just after exiting the Marine Corps, and went on to have a solid career in the UFC that included memorable bouts with Sonnen, Chris Leben, Michael Bisping and Wanderlei Silva. After retiring from fighting he instantly became one of the top color commentators on UFC broadcasts. He went on to earn an MBA from Northwestern, and now serves as CEO of Hunt Military Communities, the nation’s largest owner of military housing.
Stann is another one of those people who seems to have it all together. Maybe that’s why hearing it from him made it easier for Sonnen to accept that post-fight depression could get to anyone. When I reached out to ask what Stann had said to Sonnen to explain the phenomenon, he had no trouble putting it into words.“When you win, you have this monumental feeling that simply can't be replicated anywhere else in your life,” Stann said. “You had this huge mountain to climb, you do it, it finally happens. And when it's over, you kind of fall into this lull where it’s this dead zone as a fighter. It’s like that until the phone rings and you get your next fight, your next mountain to climb. That can be really tough, especially when a lot of fighters, their life is really different when they're in training camp.”
Training for a UFC fight is an intense, all-consuming process, Stann explained. There’s a date on the calendar and another human being somewhere out there in the world who’s thinking only about beating you up. And you, similarly, are thinking only about him.
For weeks you live that way. A “razor focus,” as Stann put it. Your training regimen and diet are the most important things in your life. All the other stuff you might want to do — take your kids out for ice cream, drink a cold beer, eat a huge meal and fall asleep on the couch — becomes stuff you’ll do later, after the fight. In your mind, that lovely life on the other side of the fight feels like a paradise in waiting. But when you actually get there, Stann explained, mainly what you feel is a sudden absence.“You miss it,” said Stann. “Suddenly there’s a lot of white space in your day, and you don’t really know what to do with it.”And that’s if you win. That’s the best-case scenario. If you lose, you have all that stuff to look forward to plus the despair of professional failure. It’s like any career setback, except this one was broadcast on live TV — and it may or may not come with a free concussion thrown in for good measure.The other part is that, with a win or a loss, everyone you know seems to want to talk to you about your fight. That can get annoying even in victory. In defeat it’s borderline intolerable.
“I remember when I lost to Chael, my barber had an opinion on it,” Stann said. “I had a job at the time, and the people at work would read the articles and tell me what the writers and the journalists had to say about my fight. You can't find people who ask you, ‘Hey how are your kids doing? Drove past your house, looks like you did some work to the front lawn.’ Nobody wants to talk about that. They only ask you about the fight. And man, you could get really caught up where that becomes your identity. Your identity is no longer your character, your family, who you are, your faith. Your identity is the last performance you had in that Octagon.”This is part of why fighting can be like an addiction for many people, Stann said. If you fight and win, you get a high that you can’t get anywhere else in your life, followed by a lull that only encourages you to chase the next high. If you lose, the fall is even more precipitous, and you become convinced that only the high of a win will bring you back up again.It’s this thinking that can be really dangerous, Stann said. His advice to fighters in the throes of this cycle was to remember that fighting is a thing they do, but not the entirety of who they are.“I think that that's really essential,” Stann said. “And it's really the same thing for military veterans. I've seen military veterans go to way darker corners of their mind with regret, with survivor's guilt. When they took that uniform off, they felt like that's what made them who they are. They have to get to a place where they realize it's not, that they can still take all the energy and skills and leadership abilities they gained and apply it to something new.”
Gaining that perspective can be easier said than done. According to Poirier, beginning therapy after his loss to Gaethje helped him put things in the proper focus. It’s how he came to realize that fighting could be a job, but might ultimately leave him unfulfilled as a totalizing identity.“I think it’s important to like, open up and talk about how you feel,” Poirier said. “You know, we’re such in the spotlight of being tough guys all the time, but we’re people too. That’s the part of the mindset, like, Dustin the fighter. But what about Dustin? What about me?”Because when the fighting is done, then it’s only the person left. And eventually, no matter how many fights you win or how much money you make, everyone has to take off the gloves for the last time.
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The antitrust lawsuit against the UFC is over and the shareholders are happy. That was the big news Wednesday, as the UFC’s parent company — TKO Group Holdings — filed a disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealing that the company has settled two separate class action lawsuits with a total payout of $335 million.Within 20 minutes, the TKO stock price had jumped more than 5% and was up 7.84% at market close. Clearly, investors are happy to see these lawsuits, with estimated potential damages set as high as $1.6 billion, get put to rest.
But what does it all mean for the UFC, the fighters, and the sport of MMA? To get a full picture of that, we’ll have to wait for still more dust to settle. While we know the dollar amount of the settlement, we don’t know yet how it will be apportioned among the fighters involved or what other provisions might be included in the settlement.John Nash, who’s covered these antitrust cases extensively on his Substack and “Hey Not The Face!” podcast, said he expects there to be some changes to standard UFC contracts included as part of the settlement.“If I had to guess, I’d say any changes would probably be similar to what they were for the 2017 [UFC] contracts,” Nash told Yahoo Sports. “That could put a timeline and maybe something like a five-year maximum on the [fighter] contracts.”
Those changes helped make it possible for then-UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou to wait out his UFC contract and become a free agent. He’s since secured big paydays as a pro boxer that were far in excess of what Ngannou has said he earned as a UFC champion, and it likely wouldn’t have been possible without those brief but consequential contractual changes.That could be a positive change for fighters, but it’s far from the total realignment of the sport that some fighters in the lawsuit class had called for. And while it likely means six-figure payouts for many of those fighters, it also surprised many people that fighters would be willing to accept a settlement rather than insisting on their day in court.Nash, however, wasn’t quite so surprised.“I think a lot of people got enamored by the possibility of a trial here, but the reality is that that’s too risky a possibility for either party,” Nash said. “People got obsessed over the number, the $800 million to $1.6 billion [which would then be tripled under U.S. antitrust law], but that’s why I said [the UFC] would probably have to settle because the risk is so incredible.”
For the fighters, there was considerable risk as well. If they went to trial and lost, they’d get nothing. Even if they did win a major victory, it might be years before they saw any of the money from it. Many of the fighters who were instrumental in bringing these suits had claimed loftier goals at the outset, but now seem to have decided that money in hand outweighed some of those broader aspirations.Former UFC middleweight Nate Quarry, who was a vocal part of the fighter cohort in this class action, wrote on Reddit that the settlement “seemed to be the best option” available at this point.“No, we didn’t get everything we wanted,” Quarry wrote. “Our goal all along was to change the sport. However, we had quite a few delays that we had to deal with. And to get injunctive relief, ie change the sport, we would have had to refile both lawsuits and combine them, go through discovery all over again, retake depositions, about a five year delay and then hope we get granted class action status again. We’d be looking at another ten years just to be where we are today with no guarantee of winning any punitive amount of injunctive change.“As I said, weighing all the possible outcomes this seemed the best outcome. We’re not hi-fiving one another. But we are pleased that a lot of fighters are going to be getting some compensation for being underpaid. Wish we could’ve done more.”
One loser in the settlement could be the competing MMA organizations who were hoping to see the playing field leveled. If a court had found that the UFC used anticompetitive practices to gain monopsony power in the sport, the resulting fallout probably would have produced an easier environment for promoting events outside the UFC. Instead, the status quo is likely to be mostly upheld, maintaining the UFC’s position as the unchallenged behemoth of MMA.But there’s also the chance that fans and media lost out a little here too. Much of what we know about the inner workings of the UFC’s business comes from two sources: the sale of the UFC to Endeavor in 2016 and the documents circulated among potential investors, and the depositions and documents that were unsealed as part of the early stages of these antitrust cases.If those lawsuits had gone to trial, we probably would have learned even more about how the UFC operates, how it views and treats its fighters, and how its managed to stay so far ahead of potential competitors. Instead, the settlement slams that door shut. Some secrets get to stay in the black box after all.There’s also the question of where this leaves hopes for lasting changes. Back in 2015, when I first spoke to Rob Maysey, an attorney who was instrumental in bringing the antitrust suit, he laid out a plan to use antitrust action to force the UFC to negotiate with a fighters association. Maysey even helped start one such association — the Mixed Martial Arts Fighters Association — though it was mostly an aspirational organization that lacked collective bargaining power with the UFC.
Just as the NFL players gained an association of their own and the collective bargaining power to go with it only through arduous legal action, Maysey said, this was the fighters’ best hope to form an association that the UFC would be legally forced to recognize and negotiate with. But what becomes of that hope now that fighters have agreed to a settlement and some guaranteed cash instead?Maysey didn’t reply to a request for comment, but the MMAFA account posted a message on social media saying it was “pleased with the settlement and will disclose more when we file with the Court in 45-60 days.”While the UFC might be on its way to being a few hundred million dollars lighter in the wallet by then, it seems likely it’ll still have the same firm grasp on the sport that’s now bringing the company more than $1 billion per year — and growing.
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The way Dustin Poirier put it seemed to surprise many people. Maybe it’s because of who he is, which is to say one of the most successful and seemingly levelheaded fighters still active in the sport, the kind of guy who seems to always have it together. Or maybe it was because of how he put it in an interview with Ariel Helwani on “The MMA Hour” earlier this week.In the aftermath of his knockout loss to Justin Gaethje last year, Poirier said, he slipped into a “darkness” that consumed his thoughts, causing genuine concern for his own well-being.“The world doesn’t know, but the people close to me know,” Poirier said. “I went through some real mental struggles.”
This echoed what we heard from former UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski just a few months ago. Trying to explain why he accepted a short-notice fight up a weight class against an opponent who’d already beaten him once, Volkanovski explained that he’d been struggling mentally and hoped booking a fight would help.“For some reason, when I wasn't fighting or in camp or keeping busy, I was just doing my head in,” Volkanovski said at the time.Stick around this sport long enough and you’ll realize this is a recurring theme. Those periods after each fight, whether they win or lose, can be hard on fighters. There are several very good reasons for this, just like there are several reasons why active fighters aren’t eager to admit to struggling with it. (Just look up some of the reactions from peers to Volkanovski’s admission, for instance.)
I was reminded of this while asking around among fighters this week. Many of those still making their way in the sport didn’t want to discuss the bouts of post-fight depression. They worried fans or fellow fighters might use it against them in the future. Then I asked Chael Sonnen, half-expecting to get some tough guy answer in keeping with his public persona.
“OMG, post-fight depression is very real,” Sonnen wrote back. “I experienced it every time, and I faked my way through it because I thought it was my dirty secret.”What made him realize he wasn’t alone, Sonnen said, was a discussion with a former opponent named Brian Stann, who explained it in a way that made sense. It also helped him realize he wasn’t alone in struggling with it.Stann may be one of the most all-around remarkable individuals to ever fight in the UFC. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he played linebacker on the Midshipmen football team, Stann received the Silver Star for valor in combat while serving in Iraq.Stann entered the UFC just after exiting the Marine Corps, and went on to have a solid career in the UFC that included memorable bouts with Sonnen, Chris Leben, Michael Bisping and Wanderlei Silva. After retiring from fighting he instantly became one of the top color commentators on UFC broadcasts. He went on to earn an MBA from Northwestern, and now serves as CEO of Hunt Military Communities, the nation’s largest owner of military housing.
Stann is another one of those people who seems to have it all together. Maybe that’s why hearing it from him made it easier for Sonnen to accept that post-fight depression could get to anyone. When I reached out to ask what Stann had said to Sonnen to explain the phenomenon, he had no trouble putting it into words.“When you win, you have this monumental feeling that simply can't be replicated anywhere else in your life,” Stann said. “You had this huge mountain to climb, you do it, it finally happens. And when it's over, you kind of fall into this lull where it’s this dead zone as a fighter. It’s like that until the phone rings and you get your next fight, your next mountain to climb. That can be really tough, especially when a lot of fighters, their life is really different when they're in training camp.”
Training for a UFC fight is an intense, all-consuming process, Stann explained. There’s a date on the calendar and another human being somewhere out there in the world who’s thinking only about beating you up. And you, similarly, are thinking only about him.
For weeks you live that way. A “razor focus,” as Stann put it. Your training regimen and diet are the most important things in your life. All the other stuff you might want to do — take your kids out for ice cream, drink a cold beer, eat a huge meal and fall asleep on the couch — becomes stuff you’ll do later, after the fight. In your mind, that lovely life on the other side of the fight feels like a paradise in waiting. But when you actually get there, Stann explained, mainly what you feel is a sudden absence.“You miss it,” said Stann. “Suddenly there’s a lot of white space in your day, and you don’t really know what to do with it.”And that’s if you win. That’s the best-case scenario. If you lose, you have all that stuff to look forward to plus the despair of professional failure. It’s like any career setback, except this one was broadcast on live TV — and it may or may not come with a free concussion thrown in for good measure.The other part is that, with a win or a loss, everyone you know seems to want to talk to you about your fight. That can get annoying even in victory. In defeat it’s borderline intolerable.
“I remember when I lost to Chael, my barber had an opinion on it,” Stann said. “I had a job at the time, and the people at work would read the articles and tell me what the writers and the journalists had to say about my fight. You can't find people who ask you, ‘Hey how are your kids doing? Drove past your house, looks like you did some work to the front lawn.’ Nobody wants to talk about that. They only ask you about the fight. And man, you could get really caught up where that becomes your identity. Your identity is no longer your character, your family, who you are, your faith. Your identity is the last performance you had in that Octagon.”This is part of why fighting can be like an addiction for many people, Stann said. If you fight and win, you get a high that you can’t get anywhere else in your life, followed by a lull that only encourages you to chase the next high. If you lose, the fall is even more precipitous, and you become convinced that only the high of a win will bring you back up again.It’s this thinking that can be really dangerous, Stann said. His advice to fighters in the throes of this cycle was to remember that fighting is a thing they do, but not the entirety of who they are.“I think that that's really essential,” Stann said. “And it's really the same thing for military veterans. I've seen military veterans go to way darker corners of their mind with regret, with survivor's guilt. When they took that uniform off, they felt like that's what made them who they are. They have to get to a place where they realize it's not, that they can still take all the energy and skills and leadership abilities they gained and apply it to something new.”
Gaining that perspective can be easier said than done. According to Poirier, beginning therapy after his loss to Gaethje helped him put things in the proper focus. It’s how he came to realize that fighting could be a job, but might ultimately leave him unfulfilled as a totalizing identity.“I think it’s important to like, open up and talk about how you feel,” Poirier said. “You know, we’re such in the spotlight of being tough guys all the time, but we’re people too. That’s the part of the mindset, like, Dustin the fighter. But what about Dustin? What about me?”Because when the fighting is done, then it’s only the person left. And eventually, no matter how many fights you win or how much money you make, everyone has to take off the gloves for the last time.
#Ben fowlkes#Mma#Depression#Mental health#Website wouldn't screenshot#So Wall o' text it is#dustin poirier#alexander volkanovski#Brian Stann#Chael Sonnen
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