Nick Diaz, unjustly railroaded by the Nevada State Athletic Commission for the crime of “maybe smoking marijuana” too close to his January cage fight against Anderson Silva, needed 100,000 signatures in order to prompt a White House response to his desperate cry for justice. He had a month to get them. With two days to spare, and after a push from a collection of allies that inexplicably included the pop star Cher alongside MMA royalty like Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, Diaz met the mark.
More than 107,000 fans (at press time) leaped through the necessary hoops to make their voices heard by the most powerful executive in the nation. And while the White House is unlikely to respond to a petition regarding an ongoing legal dispute, that’s hardly the point.
No one truly expected the President of these United States to come down from rarefied air in order to shoot the athletic commission the double bird or end his second term with an executive order making “don’t be scared homie” the law of the land.
The petition served a different purpose. It allowed us all a voice—and together we sent a message both loud and clear.
“It’s so not right for him to be suspended five years for marijuana,” Rousey told MMA Fighting. “I’m against them testing for weed at all. It’s not a performance-enhancing drug. It has nothing to do with athletic competition. It’s only tested for political reasons. They say, ‘Oh, it’s only for your safety to keep you from hurting yourself because you’re out there.’ Why don’t they test for all of the other things that could possibly hurt us?”
The tale of Diaz’s failed drug screening, his third for his use of legal medical marijuana, is byzantine. As ESPN’s Bret Okomoto reported, Diaz’s five-year suspension came in the face of evidence he likely wasn’t guilty at all:
The circumstances of the failed test were unique in that Diaz passed two drug tests on fight night but failed a third.
The failed test was collected and analyzed under different methods than the other two. The two clean tests, administered prefight and postfight, were analyzed by the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory (SMRTL) — which is accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency — in Salt Lake City.
The failed test, which was administered between the two clean ones, was analyzed by Quest Diagnostics.
Diaz’s attorneys argued that the Quest results were “scientifically unreliable,” unlike the SMRTL results, which were obtained using WADA’s higher standard of protocols.
Diaz’s real crime, it seemed in the wake of a contentious Commission hearing, was his failure to pay his interlocutors proper respect. By refusing to answer questions, Diaz put himself squarely in the cross hairs. And they weren’t firing blanks.
Diaz is a man with rapid eyes, darting terrified beads that never seem to grasp hold. He doesn’t make much of a witness. Like in all things, he’s too honest for comfort. Pleading the fifth, a right granted by the Supreme Court to both angels and demons, only made sense. Otherwise, he might have confessed to offenses committed only in a dream.
Fighting is lying. It’s subterfuge, bad intention hiding behind the benign. But in a world tinged with irony, Diaz is the last honest man. He approaches his life the same way he approaches opponents in the cage. Straight ahead. Muttering curses. Facing his fears and attempting to draw yours to the surface.
Once, at a post-fight press conference, Diaz railed at his plight, his inability to navigate the unfamiliar world of the middle class. It was a topography he didn’t know, and he was adrift without a map. Bank loans and money market accounts were troubles meant to plague a different kind of man he said, a man who had the upbringing to handle it.
The media, thinking it was watching a bit, laughed uproariously. But Diaz was not joking. Success, for some, can be its own kind of cage.
Only predators and prey populate the combat sports. Sometimes a man is both in the same breath, too caught up in the magic and allure to realize the thing he loves most is killing him slowly. More often than not, the MMA alpha males never understand they might be anything but the hunter until they are in the snare, snarling and helpless.
Diaz seemed more attuned than most to the fact that fighters might not have the last laugh. His appealing brand of bravado and bombast has a brittle veneer, like he’s desperately trying to convince himself of his own primacy. It’s a vulnerability to makes us love him. You can feel the fear emanating off of him, its waves humanizing, powerful.
Measuring Diaz’s grief, an ancient pain that seems to know no limits, doesn’t require an exploitative interview, emotions dumped raw on the world with no context or care. You need only look at his face to see an aching longing, thousands of hurts piled up over the years weighing on him, despair and grief and desperation an anchor he can’t quite pull from the ground.
“It’s upsetting,” Diaz told TMZ after the hearing. “I held off on having kids and getting married so I could fight. I gave my life to this. I am a fighter. It’s what I am. A lot of guys have to worry about what their wives and kids think, I don’t. All my attention goes towards fighting, and now I don’t know if I can fight. They’ve taken it away from me.”
Nick Diaz needs fighting. And fighting needs Nick Diaz. We all need justice, whether it comes from Mr. Obama in the White House or through the kind of grassroots activism that made this petition a success.
What happened to Diaz is not justice. And while that justice may not come in the form of an executive order, it will come in time as we highlight abuses in the system. If nothing else, at least we managed to do that much. Fighters deserve better. Nick Diaz deserved better.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com