Why, hello again. So, as you probably already know, The Athletic gutted its once glorious combat coverage team, meaning I’m no longer writing for that particular outfit. The good news is I don’t have to send distress signals to you from Behind The Paywall. If I’m being honest, I always considered myself more of a writer than I did a salesman, anyway. Anything you see from me in this space will be free for you to look at and do what you want with. 

With that out of the way, just wanted to say I’ve missed you and I’m happy to create a spot I can use to comment on the fights again, a space that has nothing to do with paywalls and click-bait headlines and/or the ultimate repackaging of other people’s tweets. This thing is unshackled by design. Who knows, from time to time I might even write about other stuff in here as the mood strikes. That’s the beauty of it. There aren’t any editors around to fuck with me. And I can prove it. Check this out…

Women’s bantamweight Jim Miller is a vegan.

See there? 

Jim Miller is neither a bantamweight nor a vegan and — if we’re really nitpicking — not even a woman, yet that sentence made it to publication. If I’d tried that sentence at ESPN back in the day, here’s guessing somebody would have given me a hard time about it. Not here. Here it’s for my readers to give me a hard time about it. The readers and Jim Miller.

Not that I intend to fill this scroll with lies and nonsense. My intention is basically to do what I’ve always done, which is write some columns for you to read and enjoy and perhaps even get angry over, hopefully striking some chords along the way that just might enhance your fight-watching experience. I like fighting. I like writing. Why not reunite those simple enthusiasms once again in a little self-governed blogthing?

So this is just a note to let you know that I’m back in the game…or, in the very least back in the fight game’s margins. It’s been strange watching things from the sidelines these past months. Watching the MMA media from the outside for a change. Watching Dana hate on the MMA media. Watching the MMA media hate on Dana hating the media. Watching Dana watch the illegal streamers watching the fights for free, and then watching the media reactions. It’s been…educational, if nothing else. This really is the lunatic fringe. 

And this break has made me realize I really couldn’t be more at home in it.

Hope you dig it and, as always, thanks for reading.