Answering a phone call when you aren’t sure who or what awaits on the other end can be a dicey proposition in the best of times. When you’re Chael Sonnen, and life is a constant roller coaster ride of your own devising, that’s especially true.
But sometimes courage is rewarded. Sometimes you hit that green button and it’s WWE legend Jim Ross on the other end with an intriguing offer from BattleGrounds MMA, a chance to join him in the announce booth for their inaugural pay-per-view this Friday. Sometimes, you get a third chance to make things right with the sport you love.
“The only apprehension I had was who my partner was going to be. I didn’t want it to be somebody who would be uncomfortable with a ‘that rasslin guy’ coming into MMA as his partner. Who might resent me,” Ross told Bleacher Report in an exclusive interview. “I gave Chael a call. We’ve never met. But I loved his studio work on Fox. I thought he was one of the bright shining stars on the UFC coverage and he had a really compelling personality as that American Gangster guy. The guy has a little edge, he’s really bright and he talks in sound bites when he needs to. He understands the genre. He gets it. He reminded me a lot of Paul Heyman back in the day.
“Knowing that he had got into the situation he found himself in, losing his gig at UFC and losing his gig at Fox, I assumed he’d be available. But I didn’t know if he’d have an interest. Because it would be brand new to him, too. He’s a studio guy. There’s a big difference between being a studio guy and calling it live cageside as it unfolds.“
Sonnen, however, was quick to agree. After months on the sidelines, this was his opportunity to get back to living and breathing MMA. The idea that it should be a frightening proposition, he told Bleacher Report, never really occurred to him—especially with Ross at the helm. For him, it will be a return to the world that made him a star. But he’s not sure yet whether it will be a permanent one.
“As far as my participation in this sport, I don’t know. I got to operate in a lot of roles. As a competitor, as a coach and behind the scenes in the office as well. I had a lot of fun and I cherish those memories. But my time is done,” Sonnen said. “I get calls for interviews and asked to weigh in on different things. But I don’t think it’s appropriate. I think you’ve got to give the guys that are out there fighting, you’ve got to give them their time. The guys who are fighting should be the ones getting the headlines.”
The opportunity to call the action, however, was too big to pass up.
“It’s different. I worked with Jon Anik and he told me that in the broadcasting world live sports is the pinnacle. That’s what you want to do,” he said. “I had never thought about it in those terms. When he told me that it became reality. Anik says live sports is the biggest thing and that’s what I want to do. This will be a chance to do it.”
It’s the first part of Sonnen‘s third act, a chance for redemption. For Ross, too, it’s another chance to get some skin back in the game.
After decades as the voice of wrestling for Vince McMahon’s WWE, doubling up at times as the company’s vice president for talent relations, Ross found himself adrift last year, put out to pasture, a victim of a promotional youth movement. It turns out that an old man in a cowboy hat and Southern accent at odds with a very New York business wasn’t considered the ideal spokesman for a television program aimed at an audience in diapers when Ross unleashed his epic and unforgettable call of Mankind’s perilous plummet from atop the Hell in the Cell.
But, for two generations worth of fans, when you think about professional wrestling, those reminisces have a soundtrack provided by Ross. The lines live in legend:
“Business is about to pick up.”
“Will somebody stop the damn match?”
As God is my witness, he is broken in half!”
If you doubt Ross’s influence on the popular culture, the Internet should disabuse you of any notion that his voice reached only the few and disenfranchised, the stereotypical wrestling fan. Ross resonated. More than a million people follow him on Twitter and his Ross Report is a podcast sensation.
Even today, his iconic voice is used to provide the excitement, passion and hyperbole so often missing from the carefully coiffed professionals who so often populate mainstream sports broadcasts. If you ever require the antidote to the Jim Nantz’s of the world, check out a clip where some enterprising young hooligan has replaced the tired and staid commentary of a sports highlight with relevant Ross commentary.
Subtle? Not always. But effective? Unquestionably.
“That was 16 years ago, the Hell in the Cell stuff,” Ross said. “And I still get people walking up to me quoting those lines. ‘Hey J.R., this game is going to be a slobberknocker!’ ‘Yeah, it sure will be.’ I want to bring the same level of enthusiasm I’ve always brought to events I’ve worked on and try to make my inflection and my tone fit the moment. That’s the deal. It has to fit the moment. It can’t be forced. Because then it would sound like a pro wrestling deal. It would sound disingenuous and I’m not looking to do that.”
The Ross on display will be the one from early in his career, when he called the action for Mid-South Wrestling. Headed by the legendary Bill Watts, it was old-school wrestling with an emphasis on sport, not shenanigans. Ross treated it seriously, discussing the wrestlers’ real-life athletic backgrounds and the story of the match as it transpired.
“He’ll definitely be the captain of the ship. I’ll take my cues from him,” Sonnen said. “Jim asked me ‘Chael, when you grew up did you think wrestling was real?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, who made you think that?’ And I said, ‘Well, you did.’ If he can make you think a fake product is real, how do you think he’s going to do with something so real in a competitive environment?”
But even at his most serious, Ross is still a showman. He knows that fans are expecting some classic Ross-isms—but only if they work in context.
“If they fit, there’s probably a good shot that some of those colloquialisms will be heard,” Ross said. “But I’m not going to force the proverbial square peg into a round hole. Am I going to have all my cliches on a sheet of paper and mark them off as we go? No. A lot of that stuff is just instinctual. You just feel it and you do it. But I’m going to have so much on my mind I won’t have time to think, ‘Don’t forget to get your stuff in. Make sure you say slobberknocker at least once an hour.'”
Ross and Sonnen were both a little lost, drifting, waiting for an opportunity like this to find them. BattleGrounds MMA is not UFC and it’s not WWE. It’s a bit “indy,” an unheralded offering from a fledgling promoter, a bet that MMA is ready for a nostalgia act, an eight-man one-night tournament that harks back to the sport’s earliest days.
“I can count the number of eight-man tournament winners on one hand. It’s a very, very rare thing. They don’t even exist anymore. Everyone who’s ever won one has a very meaningful place in MMA history. If you beat three men in one night, it’s a big deal,” Sonnen said. “I’m impressed that guys have raised their hands and volunteered to do this. You don’t have to walk out there. We are a volunteer army in this sport. It’s a very daunting task. Which is largely why the tournament went away.”
The names aren’t big ones. Ross and Sonnen will dwarf any competitor in relative fame and Q rating. The prestige signings are two UFC castoffs, J.T. Taylor and Cody McKenzie, who are both plenty respectable fighters. But the names, with due respect, don’t matter. The roster has changed multiple times during BattleGround’s wild journey. Ultimately it’s the concept, not the individual fighters, that matters most.
“I did an eight-man tournament. And I didn’t win,” Sonnen continued. “It was won by a man named Babalu. I’ve never looked at Babalu the same since that night. He could have lost every other fight he had in his career—I look at him differently. Just because it’s so hard. It’s going to be a big deal. You’re going to get the money and everything that comes along with it, but they’re also going to be able to write their own ticket. They’ll be able to go anywhere they want and they’ll deserve it all.”
For a beginner, promoter Bryan O’Rourke seems to be making all the right moves. Locally he’s leveraging the influence of Oklahoma wrestling legend Kenny Monday, making the Olympic gold medalist the face of the promotion for a fanbase that remember his exploits clearly. Nationally, he’s enlisted the aid of Doug Jacobs and his team at Integrated Sports, the leading independent distributor of sports PPV in the world. The result is a show available on essentially every cable and satellite system in the country.
“I don’t mean to sound obnoxious, but if I put my stamp of approval on something, most of the time they take it,” Jacobs said. “…I think there are opportunities in MMA. And going back to the one-night tournament was an idea (cable companies) liked. If you just have a card full of former UFC and Bellator guys, how does that differentiate you from a UFC or Bellator event, whether free or on pay-per-view?
“When I first started distributing soccer in the mid-’90s, it was pre-Fox Soccer channel, pre-Goal TV. People who were hard-core fans were desperate to see soccer, so you could put almost anything on and people would buy it. I think at one point there was a similar situation with MMA. The only place you could see it was on PPV. Now, with so much MMA available on free television, for something to be successful on pay-per-view it needs a uniqueness to it.
“I think people are excited to see something different. It’s that unique, throwback twist, allowed us to get fully distributed. It’s the same distribution as a Manny Pacquiao fight or a UFC event—every cable company, every Telco, in the U.S. and Canada.”
For all Jacobs’ considerable influence, the broadcast team wasn’t his idea. He gives the credit to O’Rourke, who deflects it back to Ross. Sonnen was his call, literally, a partner he went out and pursued on his own before bringing the idea back to BattleGrounds.
You can see where Ross is coming from, of course. Sonnen is a magnetic television presence. He helped reinvent fight promotion in the UFC, giving rise to a new breed of self-promoting fighter like Conor McGregor. But it’s not a choice without risk.
“I just have a gut feeling we’re going to have chemistry,” Ross said. “And I don’t have anything to base that on, except for my instincts. We’ll obviously find out on Oct. 3. But I think he’s going to be outstanding. And, as Rock would say, I know my role. My role isn’t to pretend I’m an MMA expert. I’m a storyteller. I’ve done an awful lot of live television. Mechanically, I have the skill set. I can help him with that. The technique and the mechanics of fighting? He can help me with that. I don’t need to be the expert. Chael Sonnen is the expert.”
Sonnen, for all his talents on the microphone, has never called a live-action fight. There’s room for stale script in a studio television appearance and bluster can carry you through a wrestling style interview. Talking nonstop for more than three hours requires a different kind of skill set, one that Sonnen will be forced to hone on the fly.
“I talked to Jim about it and the one thing he doesn’t like in his experience is scripts. He doesn’t like to rehearse it or have a plan,” Sonnen said. “I know the sport really well. Jim knows the sport. We both like talking about it. Neither one of us gets tired or runs out of energy. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun. When you go in with those kinds of expectations, when the goal is having fun and sharing that enthusiasm with the viewer, I think it’s a good sign you’ll have a good evening.”
Veterans of the industry have seen all kinds of disasters, especially when a first-time announcer steps into the booth. They can talk too much, distracting from the action. They can talk too little, not doing nearly enough to give the bouts context or depth. Sometimes they can even accidentally talk to the audience at home instead of producers in the truck.
This thing could easily devolve into a complete train wreck, something everyone involved is keenly aware of. But the show’s executive producer, former WWE television chief Nelson Sweglar, believes Ross, a veteran of thousands of hours of live TV, can help Sonnen find his way the same way he’s helped dozens of other novice broadcasters in his day.
“As my old friend Vince McMahon used to say, ‘If it goes bad, we always meant it to be that way.’ I never really was sure what Vince meant by that,” Sweglar said with a laugh. “…But Jim comes with all kinds of experience. The ability to improvise within a given structure, a skill you learn in wrestling to advance the story, doesn’t go to waste in professional sports like MMA.
“It takes awhile for a new person to get a sense of when to talk. And not to step on each other’s lines. It’s an interesting talent, to read the speech patterns of the guy sitting next to you. Jim is very good at knowing how to read the person sitting next to him and keeping folks in rhythm.”
While Ross is holding Sonnen‘s hand, the same thing is true vice versa. For all his experience in the broadcast booth, Ross has never called an MMA fight, though he did dabble with a bit of boxing earlier this year. Sonnen, a veteran of 44 career fights, will fill in the blanks when it comes to technical nuance. Ross, in turn, will concentrate on the narrative.
“The fights are what it’s all about. That’s where the rubber meets the road. But there are some displaced wrestling fans who will probably want to hear good old J.R. on commentary again,” Ross admits. “Am I going to stink the joint out or am I going to come through with flying colors? And how will Chael do sitting at cageside? There are fans who will want to see how he transitions too. There is curiosity about the broadcast. There’s a lot of traffic.
“Hopefully fans will give us a try and not condemn the show and the broadcast until they see how things are going to go. I’m really excited about the opportunity and think it’s going to be fun. That’s the main thing for me at this stage of the game. I want to earn my stripes. For the MMA fans who are purists, I want them to know I have great respect for the genre. I’m a big fan just like they are.”
BattleGrounds MMA ‘O.N.E.’ will be broadcast live from the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this Friday beginning at 10 p.m. EST/7 p.m. PST at a price point of $19.95. In addition, the event will be available online as an iPPV on Go Fight Live.
Jonathan Snowden is Bleacher Report’s lead combat sports writer. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were acquired firsthand.
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