Photo by Tracy Lee for Yahoo! Sports
Health professionals say second hand smoke can be just as bad or worse for you than smoking itself. Well for UFC heavyweight Dan ‘Pee Wee’ Herman (21-2) it seems the doctors were right.
Herman was pulled from his upcoming UFC 136 match with Mike Russow after the Texas State Commission denied him a license after testing positive for marijuana.
The news broke Thursday morning and spread like wildfire across the net, with several sites (including this one) misquoting Herman as saying he had tested for marijuana and steroid use. Corrections were made, but the damage to ‘Pee Wee’s’ reputation was already done.
Later in the day, Herman talked to several news sites about the entire incident and gave his description of what may have happened.
“I do not smoke marijuana,” Herman told MMA Fighting. “I can’t say I’m not around it. I live in California. Pretty much everyone out here smokes weed. Maybe I need to pick my friends a little better. I don’t know.”
“When I talked to Texas they said that there wasn’t enough of the first sample to do both tests,” said Herman. “The first sample they just tested one thing and the second sample they tested something else. …They just said the first one was positive for marijuana. The second one wasn’t positive for anything.”
“I don’t think there’s anything I can really do,” he said. “Obviously, this fight’s already gone. Even if I go in today and pass everything, this fight’s already done. Pretty much I guess I just wait. They said I’ll probably have a short suspension. From researching other guys who have tested positive, the max suspension they’ve ever seen is 30 days. So I guess I wait 30 days and pass a drug test and try to get another fight lined up.”
It seems, as Herman says, that he will have to “pick my friends a little better” the next time he has a fight scheduled. Possibly secluding himself in a cave in the mountains of Utah for his next training camp. I guess we’ll have to see what sort of sentence the Texas commission implements against Herman.