Lately, ESPN’s lead UFC reporter, Ariel Helwani, has been in the news for his thoughts on what former MMA fighter Gina Carano had to say in terms of viewing her political thoughts to how Jews were treated in Nazi Germany, as well as UFC President Dana White’s response to what he had to say.
More headlines were made when Helwani received support from a former ESPN colleague in Dan Le Batard.
This week, Helwani was on the That’s What She Said podcast with Sarah Spain in an interview that was recorded at the beginning of February. While this topic was not addressed due to timing, Spain took her listeners into how Helwani has become what he is today.
Helwani told Spain that support from his colleagues was nothing new. He was banned by the UFC in 2016 after reporting at UFC 199 that Brock Lesner was going to come out of retirement. Helwani was working for MMAFighting.com at the time, but said media outlets far bigger than that picked up on his story and the story of his banishment.
“That night, I go to my hotel room and pack my bags and take a super early flight back home,” Helwani said on the podcast. “I will never forget buying the WI-FI and going on my Twitter app and seeing a flood of retweets from really famous people and people I look up to. I looked up to Dan Le Batard. I didn’t think he knew who I was and there is a DM asking if I can come on his show on Monday.”
He ended up getting another call from Scott Van Pelt to come on SportsCenter. He also made appearances on The Dan Patrick Show and The Rich Eisen Show to talk about his banning. In fact, he was on the set of SportsCenter when he got word that UFC had reversed course on their decision.
To this day, Helwani still thanks those prominent media figures for being very vocal about the UFC’s ban of him and getting his story into the mainstream media. He said without that, he would not be where he is today.
“By the way, those journalists (Dan Patrick, Dan Le Batard, Rich Eisen, Rachel Nichols, Frank Isola). If they did not stick up for me, I am not talking to you as an ESPN journalist. They saved my career, those people, because they took that story outside of the MMA bubble, so I will always be indebted to those individuals.”
As Helwani told Spain, covering the UFC is not easy because writers can be banned and he even said that the league still does not help him with much, yet he still finds a way to get the job done and successfully.
“At the end of the day, I just want to be able to do the job,” Helwani said noting that he has been told many times that a fighter’s schedule is too full to accommodate his interview requests. “I don’t want my livelihood to be messed with. I think the fans are smart. They see what’s messed up.”
