Twitter Mailbag: The PED problem rolls on, Henderson moves up, VanZant cashes in (2024)

Another week of Twitter Mailbag questions, and another week where failed drug tests and commission shenanigans dominated the headlines. It’s becoming a habit, and I’ll tell you right now, I’m getting a little tired of it.

But don’t worry, we won’t get entirely bogged down with performance-enhancing drugs and delayed responses. We’ll also find some time to discuss Reebok’s newest signee, Benson Henderson’s new weight class, and more.

As always, you can ask your own question via Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA.

That is one way to interpret it, yes. As much as we talk about how we want to see enhanced, unannounced testing rather than the same old fight night nonsense that fighters can set their watches by, we do seem to forget that more and better testing will, at least initially, probably lead to more drug test failures. We must know that, on some intellectual level. Maybe we just weren’t prepared for how it was going to feel, or which of our heroes might get caught.

But you do raise an interesting point. As sick as we might be of one failed drug test after another, we have to remind ourselves that a long run of clean results wouldn’t necessarily mean that the sport itself was clean. Lance Armstrong passed an awful lot of drug tests too.

I don’t know, and clearly neither do oddsmakers. In what little we’ve seen of him so far,Brandon Thatch has looked like one scary dude. Then again, he’s been on the shelf for more than a year, and Benson Henderson isn’t an easy target for anyone. My gut says Henderson won’t be pushed around easily at welterweight. He was big for a lightweight, and his style can frustrate and confound even experienced fighters.

My real concern is whether Henderson is truly in the right space, mentally and physically, for this bout at UFC Fight Night 60. I totally understand why he’d want to get back in action soon after that controversial decision loss to Donald Cerrone. I can also see how that might backfire in a major way against someone like Thatch. And if it does, I’m not sure where the former champ goes from there.

I think the problem is likely worse among top fighters, mostly because a) they can afford it, and b) they think they have more to gain by using and more to lose by staying clean. Fighters also tend to have a mentality that is fertile ground for PED paranoia, which in turn leads to PED justification.

What I mean by that is, fighters love to believe that there are powerful forces working against them. Whether that force is the promoter, the fans, or the media, for some reason it’s motivating to many fighters to imagine that they are being set up to fail. Maybe they’ve seen too many sports movies. Maybe it’s a self-preservation technique. It makes you work extra hard to overcome the conspiracy against you, and if you lose anyway? Well, it wasn’t a fair fight to begin with. The promoter was for the other guy. The reporters never gave you a fair shake. The judges are all crooked. Even Rocky Balboa lost, right?

This mentality is surprisingly common among fighters, even more so than among other athletes. So when they hear (or tell themselves) that 90 percent of their peers are on steroids, it’s not hard for them to believe. That makes sense to a person who already believes he is being cheated somehow. And, come on, how could some of these guys be that good/look that good naturally?

Of course, if everyone else is cheating, why shouldn’t you? You’re not gaining an unfair advantage. You’re just leveling the playing field. Either that, or you’re taking it for an injury, because if you don’t fight you don’t get paid, and then who’s going to put food on your table? Other guys are cheaters. You’re just a man doing what a man’s got to do.

The potential justifications are many and they are especially appealing to those daring, worried souls caught up in the fight game. The higher up you climb, the greater the pressure and the rewards. Dropping a couple grand on a few steroid cycles to win a regional fight with a $500 payday seems vaguely pathetic, but doing it to earn $80,000 with a win in the UFC (as opposed to half that with a loss) probably seems like a solid value proposition. If there’s anything that will convince you otherwise, it’s probably the fear of getting caught, having your money taken away, and getting branded for life with the mark of the cheater. The more powerful and realistic all those fears become, the less capable fighters will be of dismissing them.

I don’t know if we can expect testing facilities to be that picky, especially if, as in Hector Lombard’s case, the tests are done through a sponsor (in this case the hilariously named 4Ever Young Anti-Aging Solutions). I think we can, however, make some inferences about why a fighter would want to drug test himself before his bout.

One explanation might be that he’s really, really worried about false positives caused by his protein shakes. Another explanation might be that he knows he’s doping and he’s trying to make sure that everything’s out of his system before he shows up to fight. I’ll let you decide for yourself which explanation seems more plausible.

I … well … I agree with everything you just wrote. I have nothing more to offer, except this:

View post on imgur.com

I still thinkRory MacDonald needs another win – a major statement win – to get people excited about seeing him fight for the UFC welterweight strap. The UFC might decide otherwise. It might even just run out of feasible alternatives. But if we’re going to get the most bang for the buck here, I say let MacDonald remind us why he’s the top contender, rather than just waiting for all other options to be exhausted.

You can’t really blame the UFC here. It signed this deal with Reebok, but Reebok will do whatever it thinks will maximize its exposure. If that means signing a deal with a totally unproven fighter like Paige VanZant, while ignoring the champion in that same weight class, Carla Esparza, then that’s what it’s going to do.

Even if the uniform portion of this UFC-Reebok deal hasn’t kicked in yet, I think we’re getting a pretty good idea of how Reebok is approaching this thing. Sure, it signed some champs right off the bat, likeJon Jones and Ronda Rousey. It also signed the popular kids, likeConor McGregor and now VanZant. That was to be expected, honestly, since Reebok is looking to move merchandise and attach its name to the fighters people care about.

It should be wary, however, of alienating the existing fan base for the this sport, especially in how it approaches the women’s side of the MMA. If the only female fighters your company is interested in are the pretty blondes, that doesn’t encourage us to believe that you’re taking women’s MMA seriously. Sign the cool kids if you want, Reebok. Also show some respect to the champs – all of them.

I’m sure Reebok isn’t excited to see that it seems to have partnered with the UFC right in the middle of a doping crisis that could, if left unchecked, do irreparable harm to the sport of MMA and the UFC brand. I’d guess FOX probably has similar concerns, or at least it should. At the same time, these companies must have done some research before signing these deals. It’s not like PEDs are a new issue in MMA. This has been a problem for years, even if it’s taken different forms at times.

Fans and media have encouraged the UFC to use its unique power in this sport to do more about it. And, despite inching closer to meaningful change at times, the UFC has mostly opted to do nothing. It wants this to be someone else’s problem, but it isn’t. If we can’t make the UFC see that, maybe the people it’s in business with can.

There are a lot of things wrong with depending on state athletic commissions, which range from competent to laughable to non-existent, to spearhead the anti-doping effort in MMA. Some don’t have the money or the staffing. Some don’t have the experience. Others, such as the Nevada State Athletic Commission, have no one to blame but themselves for their many screw-ups lately. For a government agency to claim that it didn’t release drug test results for weeks because this website didn’t ask nicely enough, that’s ridiculous. It’s also not an isolated incident for a commission that has recently become noticeably obstinate.

Say what you will about the NSAC under the leadership of former executive director Keith Kizer, but at least it was accessible. You could call Kizer and get him to answer the phone. You could ask a direction question and get a direct answer (whether you liked what he had to say or not). These days the NSAC seems to give up and shut down entirely when there’s bad news in the air. Its meetings are venues for avoiding decisions rather than making them. It conducts drug tests it didn’t mean to, then can’t figure out what to do about the results. It catches dopers, then declines to mention it to anyone.

Seriously, this is “the government” that the UFC is regulated by? No wonder we’ve been banging our heads against the wall over the same issues for so many years.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.