Well yesterday took a turn for the weird, didn’t it? Here I was just sitting in my office, counting down the minutes until I could punch out early without the fear of BG’s almighty hand (he’s in NYC doing casting couch sessions for aspiring writers or some shit), when suddenly, everyone’s all like, “Hey Jared, Mayhem Miller’s live-tweeting his standoff with LA S.W.A.T right now. Maybe get on that.”
I tried to brush it off at first, thinking Miller is just going on one of his crazypants bananas rants again, but upon further, journalistical research (checking my Twitter feed), I find out that, yes, Mayhem is actually doing that thing people said he was. Crazy.
Thankfully, Miller surrendered a few hours after barricading himself inside his Mission Viejo home, bringing a bizarre ending to the latest in what has been a series of bizarre incidents involving Mayhem Miller. And today, some lovely, helicopter-shot footage of Miller being apprehended has been released for us all to watch before putting our heads in our hands and asking where it all went wrong.
Though absent of the crisis negotiation team and robotic bomb squad that were apparently present at the scene, the video captures roughly a dozen SWAT members exiting Mayhem’s home with a shirtless and pink-mohawked Miller in handcuffs. In the front there is Gator Dog, calmly patrolling the poolside and wondering why the men in masks are taking away his owner for the 1000th time. This whole thing makes me sad.
The LA Times reports that Miller will be held on $200,000 bail and is set to appear in court on Tuesday, October 14th. In addition to the domestic violence, stalking, and criminal contempt charges he was already facing, Mayhem has been slapped with an “obstructing a peace officer” charge as well.
One has to imagine that this will be the end of the road for Miller, who has been racking up criminal charges on a near constant basis since 2012, and what a shame it has been to witness his unfortunate downward spiral. Of course, if you’re The Daily Beast’s Robert Silverman, you can just write-off Miller’s demise as a “byproduct of the sport itself”, as he did in this insultingly under-researched article published earlier today.
The MMA Fighters Have Gone Crazy: ‘Mayhem’ Miller the Latest in a Long Line of Psycho Pugilists
While there’s no conclusive link between chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a degenerative disease brought on by multiple concussions and head injuries—and domestic violence, the symptoms of CTE include impaired judgment, impulse control problems, and increased aggression.
It’s not just the repeated blows to the head. Like all major sports, the UFC prohibits the use of performance enhancing drugs, but the rules haven’t been much of an impediment to rampant use. And whether the current drug of choice is human growth hormone combined with testosterone, or old school anabolic steroids, amphetamines, and the abuse of painkillers, there’s plenty of clinical studies that show a connection to increased hostility and aggression.
On top of all that, MMA (and yes, pro football too) is exactly the kind of sport that’s going to attract the hypermasculine, as in the clinically hypermasculine; those that are known to exhibit: (a) calloused sex attitudes toward women, (b) violence as manly, and (c) danger as exciting.
Add it all up, and of course we’re going to see more Mayhem Millers in the years to come. Like dead wrestlers, this is a natural by-product of the sport itself.
Right…so because head trauma and steroid use can lead to increased aggression, we should obviously jump to the conclusion that a clearly disturbed man like Miller, or Josh Grispi, or War Machine — all of whom have never tested positive for any kind of steroid before — can only owe their insanity to those two things. Because MMA attracts “violent people,” and rather than back this argument with any kind of evidence related to the fighters on trial (medical evaluations, psychological assessments, etc.), let’s just list a couple similar conditions we found on WebMD and call it a day.