Gus Johnson: "These Internet Guys Ruin the Sport"

I remember when Johnson was on one of the Sherdog radio shows after one of his first calls.He was all eager for compliments.

Jordan Breen gave him some love,then polietly told him that he had incorrectly called a few different kinds of sweeps an “elevator sweep”.

Johnson absolutley blew his lid,and then proceeded to tell Breen that he trained with Renzo Gracie,and if Renzo said a sweep was an elevator,then by God,he was going to call it an elevator.

What I find more hilarious,is that Josh Gross absolutley creamed his jeans when it was announced that Gus Johnson was going to commentate on CBS.He thought just because Johnson was a “pro”,he’d automatically be better than Rogan and Goldie.

Turns out Johnson is about 100 times worse than Rogan on his most stoned out day.Even when Goldie is at his most glib,he’s far,far better than Johnson.And this is from someone who usually can’t stand to listen to UFC commentary.

DON’T FIRE HIM KELVIN!!!!!!!!

LoL

…and, dayum Gus just got owned

Johnson said that baffles me,is how Strikeforce “disrespected” Shields by bringing in guys to beat him.

Ummm,Gus…….Shields in the champion.He’s supposed to fight the best guys.This ain’t boxing,where you fight a bunch of chumps and maybe fight 4 or 5 legit guys in a 50 or 60 fight career if you’re really lucky.

What would be disrespectful would be if Strikeforce rolled out a bunch of C-level opposition,and tried to present them as worthy challengers.But they aren’t.They’re bringing in guys who have a legit shot at beating Shields,and I think Shields likes that-he doesn’t want to fight chumps.He wants to fight the best.

Saying that fighting Top Ten opposition is “disrespectful” is not only bogus,it shows a total disconnect from the sport he supposedly loves and champions.

Johnson knows very little about MMA and it shows on every CBS show he is on.

I’m working on trying to get Gus on the show, FWIW.

EVeezy FTW! Great post. Fired? How about a raise? (Kelvin make it happen!)

I actually I liked Gus’ work for the Final Four. He just needs to stay the hell away from mma or maybe he needs to start blazing what Rogan smokes.

And not to kiss ass or anything but I think this mma site in particular has been nothing but positive. Keep it up, fellas.

I have never really been a fan of Johnson’s screaming style of calling games. I think it is annoying and fans completely overrate him as a commentator.

God ain’t that the truth. He’s not a bad commentator at all, and probably does a better job than I would (although you never know!), but the nut-hugging on Johnson is just UNREAL.

But really, what else would he have done, gone out and said that he did a terrible job? I’m not a fan of Gus Johnson, but he’s not BAD. He’s not that good either, but he’ll get there. He makes bad calls, but that’s natural for someone who’s calling a sport that they’ve only been involved in for a handful of events. Rogan/Goldberg were probably pretty awful their first ten times out, and people dislike them even to this day!

What I think is really funny about this whole thing is that he’s so utterly offended about being called out, then goes onto a radio show of one of these internet news sites (you know the ones that “ruin the sport”?) and fires back at some dudes. A real professional would just let it go, even if they were talking smack about his mother. When I saw this come across my desk yesterday I read through it and thought a lot of the same things that Eveezy did.

Mike Russell posted an apology on The Underground:

An explanation.

Well, I’ve written, deleted and rewritten this FRAT five times in the past 24 hours.

Now that everyone has had the opportunity to critique my article on Gus Johnson, I felt it was the right time to attempt to explain myself.

I know that whatever I write is going to be looked upon as an excuse, but I make no excuse for my lapse in judgment. I’m an adult. I rolled the dice and in an attempt to live up to the edgy, satirical benchmark set for CagePotato’s brand of humor by Ben Goldstein and Ben Fowlkes, I flopped, damaging my reputation and credibility as a journalist and doing exactly what I accused Johnson of doing: representing MMA in a bad light.

First off, I want to say that I honestly and sincerely had no intention of trying to get him fired. Truth be told, I wasn’t even expecting a reply from Coker, which is why I hastily wrote the poorly-worded email, not knowing if I even had his correct email address (which incidentally was a Hotmail address I got from a CC I got from a manager in 2007). My real intention was to hold Gus accountable and to see what repercussions his actions as a member of the media would bring, if any, kind of like the inherent right for readers to hold me accountable for my journalistic indiscretion.

Several people have pointed out that the article actual made Gus look pretty good, which was not totally unintentional on my part. As I mentioned in the article, I actually gained some respect for him for his desire to speak to me. His execution was questionable, as were a few comments he made towards me that didn’t make it into the article, but I can now see that his reaction is understandable considering he was in the heat of the moment.

Did I make a mistake? Yes.
Will it affect my career and my livelihood? Absolutely.

All I can do is move forward, seek penance and try to do what I’ve done for the past five years, which is write stories that are fair, unbiased and entertaining. Getting back into writing news after spending the past two years doing straight features is taking some getting used to. Sometimes the haste to get a story out supercedes the need to get it right. With my features, I sometimes finish them and go back the next day and completely rewrite them if I feel the tone is wrong, which in retrospect is what I should have done with this one.

I respect opinions when they are respectful and insightful, but when those with no tact or a hidden agenda (like past conflict, jealousy of my moderate success as a journalist or coveting my CP gig, for example) it’s sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. I’d like to thank Uncle Justice for pointing opening my eyes to the ramifications of my poor judgment on my career and the sport and for pointing out that I have always been a big proponent of working under the Journalism Code of Ethics and have done so for 99.9% of my career.

Edgy satire and comedy aren’t for everyone and what one might perceive as being incredibly hilarious, another might find extremely offensive. Reading back over the article, I think I tried to hard to be quirky and ignored the fundamentals of being a decent, responsible writer.

Anyway, I’ve made my peace.

Flame on.