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“Dan believes in the martial arts. Dan believes that you have respect for your opponent. That’s the way Dan’s brain works.”
Last month, veteran referee Dan Miragliotta found himself embroiled in controversy with Bellator welterweight Michael ‘Venom’ Page over his unprofessional conduct at Bellator 227 in Dublin, Ireland.
Dan was displeased with Page’s in-cage taunting and theatrics (the 32-year-old hilariously pretended to take a selfie while ground-and-pounding his opponent) and is alleged to have called ‘MVP’ ‘a piece of sh-t’ after the fight.
Miragliotta has since apologized for his behavior (taunting has always been a part of combat sports), and fellow veteran referee ‘Big’ John McCarthy admitted that Dan can sometimes get a little emotional ‘when he doesn’t like what someone does’.
“We all work inside of this box and if you’re the person, you’re the official stepping outside of that box and now taking action, you better be right, what you’re doing,” McCarthy said in a recent interview with MMA Fighting’s Alexander K. Lee. “And then everyone will adjust and bring that action inside of that box. When you’re outside of it, it’s probably not going to look good, and Dan was outside of that box.
“I’ve had guys that were the biggest trash talkers, they did more things inside than you guys ever knew about. Now I didn’t take points, if it got too loud, you would hear me say, ‘Knock it off.’ I’ve told them in the back, ‘If you say something, make sure that he, you, and I are the only ones that can hear it. If you do that, I don’t give a damn.’ Now if you cross the line, there’s always a line, you start saying a racial epithet, you are mocking someone’s religion, you are denigrating their family, you have now crossed the line and gone beyond trying to psychologically do something and the official will take action against you.”
“It’s a matter of the more that you have dealt with something and you thought about it and then you go, okay, this is what you do, now you know exactly what to do before something ever happens,” he continued. “Dan’s an emotional guy, and Dan’s a great guy. He’s as nice a human being as you will find, he’s a great official, he’s a great friend, I love him, but he gets emotional when he doesn’t like what someone does. Dan believes in the martial arts. Dan believes that you have respect for your opponent. That’s the way Dan’s brain works.
“When you do something that’s outside of his view of what the martial arts is, you can see that he gets affected by it. He’ll shake his head and he’ll do things and you’ll go, ‘Dan, stop that!’ He can’t, it’s just who he is. You can tell him stop and he goes, ‘I know, I know, I know,’ but then as soon as it happens again he’ll do the same thing. It’s something that he has to work on too, you have to be impartial, it doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do.”
Page (15-1 MMA), beat opponent Richard Kiely via flying knee KO, and the London Shootfighter will look to add another highlight reel KO to his resume when he takes on Derek Anderson at Bellator London II on Nov. 23.