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BY BEN DUFFY
APR 26, 2020
Drawing on over two decades as the global authority on mixed martial arts, “From the Vault” features current Sherdog contributors presenting noteworthy articles from yesteryear, adding hindsight, critique and personal reflections.
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To me, sports have always been about the people stories. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the small triumphs and tragedies lurking behind the big headlines.
Like many red-blooded American kids, I spent my formative years awaiting the weekly arrival of Sports Illustrated; and like many, I read each new issue cover to cover, usually more than once. In my parents’ home, where reading material was never thrown out, there was more than a decade’s worth of back issues—minus the swimsuit issues; to this day, I have no idea how my folks intercepted those or what they did with them—organized chronologically and shelved neatly, right above a similarly extensive and well-worn collection of National Geographic and directly below the thick volumes of the 1982 World Book Encyclopedia.
What always stood out to me were the smaller stories. Tucked away behind the splashy front-cover pieces about Shaquille O’Neal, Eric Lindros or Evander Holyfield, and the usual beat reports about whichever major league sport was currently in season, most issues contained one or more takeout features that zoomed in much more closely on their subject. Whether that subject was a future NBA All-Star toiling away in obscurity or a forgotten Jazz Age decathlete I would never have heard of otherwise, those were the stories that always drew my interest and fired my imagination. As a kid, I resolved that if I ever became a sportswriter, those were the kind of stories I would try to write.
By the time the article I’m presenting here was published in August 2011, I was an adult, making my living primarily through writing, and had been an obsessive MMA fan for seven or eight years. Nonetheless, it had never once occurred to me to try my hand at writing about the fight game. In hindsight, I attribute that to a strange mix of self-doubt and snobbery. On one hand, it was unthinkable that I could write about mixed martial arts—the people who wrote for my favorite MMA outlets obviously must know far more about the sport than I did, and anyway they were Professional Sportswriters, capital-P, capital-S. On the other hand, some unacknowledged part of my brain whispered that there was no place in combat sports media for the kind of stories I would have wanted to write, anyway. Subconsciously, I must have taken the relative lack of deep-dive storytelling features to mean that either there was a shortage of people in the MMA media space with the drive or talent to write them, or that there was no outlet willing to publish them. (Note that I say relative lack; I met Chuck Mindenhall a few months ago, and I was more nervous to shake his hand, and more inclined to brag about it afterwards, than any fighter or other industry figure I’ve encountered.)
Read more at: https://www.sherdog.com/news/articles/From-the-Vault-Ian-McCalls-Violent-Delights-172496
Read the 2011 original piece by Jordan Breen, which is sensational: https://www.sherdog.com/news/articles/1/Ian-McCalls-Violent-Delights-34643