Miguel Torres must have thought he was cleverly supporting the FX network by tweeting out this line from the hit show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: “”If a rape van was called a surprise van.
Miguel Torres must have thought he was cleverly supporting the FX network by tweeting out this line from the hit show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: “”If a rape van was called a surprise van more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them.” Torres later deleted the direct quote and posted a more politically correct revision: “If a windowless van was called a surprise van more people wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.”
But by then the Twitter damage was done and Dana White immediately released Torres from the UFC telling SI.com:
“There’s no explanation for that. There’s absolutely nothing I could say to make any sense of that. And the fact that he even thinks that’s funny or that’s a joke, it disturbs me. It bothers me.
Is this fair? Well, for an organization handing out Twitter bonuses for most creative tweets, maybe the UFC earns the right to punish you for tweets, as well. But it sure is a shame Torres made a stupid mistake. It was probably the absolute worst line he could have tweeted in the wake of the Forrest Griffin backlash to his misunderstood rape tweet and Rashad Evans‘ reference to Jerry Sandusky which was in awfully poor taste, though at the time, he believed it to be a witty insult against Penn State alum, Phil Davis. And all these ridiculous rape comments are coming at the worst possible time, when the UFC is just entering the world of mainstream television. Granted, Torres was quoting a Fox related network show; but the quote was unnecessary to even tweet out. And damn it, if he’d only initially posted the “window less van” version, he might still have a job.
Bottom line, our fighters are going to need PR teams checking their 140 characters or less before they hit the tweet button. Should White reconsider and relent on his decision to let go of Torres? I hope he does. I am a female with a pretty open sense of humor and I thought it was super super stupid that Torres tweeted that line. The context just wasn’t there to support him like it is when you see it spoken in the episode, “The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis”. But, I think his reputation precedes him. Regardless, these fighters need to shelve their burgeoning rape comments and remember they are role models, whether they like it or not. It’s part of the athlete’s job when he/she is publicly representing an organization that pays his/her bills. Nobody cares what the Average Joe writes, but a professional athlete is no longer anonymous or average, so people take notice.
At the very least these fighters should consider, when it comes to tweets, if you have to explain yourself past the allotted 140 characters, there’s a chance someone may not get it, so don’t tweet it. This is our sports’ time to shine and when you’re paid to be in the public eye, you have a responsibility for the sh*t you say. Leave the offensive lines to those brave keyboard warriors out there.
Filed under: UFCIt’s been a whirlwind 24 hours for Miguel Torres, the former bantamweight champion of the world who suddenly lost his job in the UFC after posting bizarre messages on Twitter that appeared to make light of rape. On Friday Torres posted …
It’s been a whirlwind 24 hours for Miguel Torres, the former bantamweight champion of the world who suddenly lost his job in the UFC after posting bizarre messages on Twitter that appeared to make light of rape. On Friday Torres posted a message on his personal web site apologizing and saying he hopes to get a second chance.
“I have a lot to be thankful for in my life, I have my beautiful wife and daughter, my family, my health, my gym, and in terms of my career, I succeeded to the biggest stage in the sport of mixed martial arts, the Ultimate Fighting Championship,” Torres wrote. “I am very sorry for upsetting my bosses at the UFC, and also to my fans and everyone else who was upset by the language in my tweets. I understand it was wrong, and I meant no harm or disrespect. Given the chance, I will do whatever it takes to make things right. I am going to learn from this. I think life throws you opportunities that can make you a better person, and so that’s what I’m going to do here. That is how I am going to react. I am going to use this to improve myself, and I hope that my fans will continue to support me.”
The apology from Torres did not include any explanation for what motivated his tweets, although the tweet that garnered the most attention was a reference to the ribald television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
In that tweet, Torres wrote, “If a rape van was called a surprise van more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone like surprises.” It apparently didn’t dawn on Torres that on Twitter, he wasn’t just having a private conversation with a fellow fan of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He was broadcasting to the 50,000 or so people who follow him, not to mention the tens of thousands more who saw his tweet elsewhere. Torres offered no context for that “joke” and the majority of the people who read his tweet had no idea why he would tweet such a message.
What’s unclear now is whether Torres’s apology will get him back into the UFC’s good graces, or whether his social media lapse in judgment will require him to find another promotion if he wants to keep making a living as an MMA fighter.
(Torres following his unanimous decision loss to social media. / Photo via ESPN)
Miguel Torres — former undisputed WEC bantamweight champion and die-hard fan ofrape jokes — has been released by the UFC. Dana White confirmed the firing yesterday evening, telling SI.com, “his career with us now is over.”
The reason for Torres’s release was a tweet that reportedly read, “If a rape van was called a surprise van, more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.” Torres later removed the tweet and replaced it with an edited version. White was informed of the tweet second-hand by Michael Landsberg and made the decision to fire Torres shortly after.
So why is Torres being made an example of, when Forrest Griffin and Rashad Evans made similar off-color statements recently? Basically, it’s because he didn’t have a good enough explanation.
(Torres following his unanimous decision loss to social media. / Photo via ESPN)
Miguel Torres — former undisputed WEC bantamweight champion and die-hard fan ofrape jokes — has been released by the UFC. Dana White confirmed the firing yesterday evening, telling SI.com, “his career with us now is over.”
The reason for Torres’s release was a tweet that reportedly read, “If a rape van was called a surprise van, more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.” Torres later removed the tweet and replaced it with an edited version. White was informed of the tweet second-hand by Michael Landsberg and made the decision to fire Torres shortly after.
So why is Torres being made an example of, when Forrest Griffin and Rashad Evans made similar off-color statements recently? Basically, it’s because he didn’t have a good enough explanation.
As Dana White tells Ariel Helwani in a video interview released last night, Griffin explained to him that his “rape is the new missionary” tweet was intended to be a commentary on the prevalence of sex crime coverage on television, while Rashad’s Jerry Sandusky reference was an attempted dig at Phil Davis’s alma mater gone too far. (Dana claims he couldn’t hear the line during the press conference because the microphones were going in and out, though he laughed anyways.)
The problem with Torres’s “rape van” tweet was that it had no other purpose, context, or explanation, other than allegedly being a quote from either It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Workaholics. Said Dana: “That’s not a funny joke to me. That’s just not something you tweet. If that’s your sense of humor, keep it at home around you and your buddies and keep it to yourself. It’s not something that you put out on twitter. And there’s no explanation for it. I can’t make any sense of it. And enough is enough. When you’re getting ready to twitter, or you’re getting ready to say something, think about what you’re gonna say, think about what you’re gonna tweet, and use a little common sense…that tweet makes no sense, and the fact that you say it was a joke bothers me even more.”
White goes on to explain that this is the first thing that Miguel Torres has done to offend him — he considers Torres a good guy and a great champion otherwise — and he would have been fired even if this situation didn’t occur on the heels of the Forrest Griffin and Rashad Evans controversies. (For the record, Rashad won’t receive any punishment for his own tasteless joke.)
Torres isn’t the first fighter to be fired by the UFC due to an Internet posting. I mean shit, we were just talking about War Machine. But now that every other UFC fighter is trying to be a part-time comedian in order to nab a Twitter performance bonus, a new message needed to be sent: Use your head, because the world is watching.
First of all, I like Miguel Angel Torres, and I’ll always respect him despite his often-ridiculous tweets, but even I’ll say I can see why Torres got released from the UFC.Yes, MMA is popular right now, but it’s not yet at a stage where it can handle a…
First of all, I like Miguel Angel Torres, and I’ll always respect him despite his often-ridiculous tweets, but even I’ll say I can see why Torres got released from the UFC.
Yes, MMA is popular right now, but it’s not yet at a stage where it can handle a lot of negative publicity or any sort of negative attention, so for that, I see why Dana White might have followed through as per his standard and opted to cut Torres.
After all, Torres is a professional athlete and, given the past history of athletes taking to Twitter to tweet eventual nuggets of controversy, keeping surprise vans and rape to oneself is common sense.
However, so is not being the same hypocritical “holier-than-thou” type of person that one claims to be unable to stand, whether on or off Twitter.
If watching one’s Tweet content is common sense, then shouldn’t it be common sense that a draw like Torres be reprimanded for his tweet before apologizing, as opposed to being cut when Forrest Griffin and Rashad Evans have said considerably worse or similar things and are still on the roster?
I understand Forrest has helped support charities that teach others about the dangers of rape, and I know Rashad Evans said he talked to Dana White about the Penn State comment he made at Wednesday’s UFC on FOX 2 press conference, but for them to get fined while Torres gets cut is an abominable act by a man who is living by a double standard.
While it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint, it’s sickening on all accounts from a personal standpoint, as Torres has followed suit with Griffin and Evans, who were noted for saying things in the general category but were not released.
Maybe the statement of Torres not knowing about Griffin or Evans is what caused the release because as a person in the same profession as both TUF winners, you have to pay some attention to the situations around you, and Torres, like Evans, trains with the all-star assembly-line of fighters known as The Blackzillians. But let’s not forget one thing:
Torres quoted a TV show, “Workaholics” (earlier, it was thought to be a quote from Danny Devito’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”).
Evans, on the other, knocked on Phil Davis by saying he’d touch Davis worse than Jerry Sandusky or Joe Paterno did to those boys at Penn State, and the Penn State sex scandal has been an increasingly hot topic for a month now, and this issue is not one that has gone away yet.
Evans claims—or at least Dana says—that he made the mistake of letting his mouth go, but if he were truly sorry, wouldn’t Evans have found a way to diss Davis?
I mean, it sounds like that’s Dana’s current reaction to Torres’ tweet is all-in-all saying “If Torres were really joking, he’d have kept that to himself, even if it did come from a TV show,” right?
Whatever the case, Dana’s double standard is ridiculous and atrociously inconsistent. If one fighter is fined or reprimanded in some way for a tweet concerning rape vans but he is NOT cut, then that is a trend that should stay consistent, and while there’s no real excuse for Torres’s initial tweet, there’s are few more and much less excuses for Dana White hypocrisy in this case.
If he has any issue with the consensus opinion which favors a re-signing of the former WEC Bantamweight Champion, he can either choose to refuse to give the fans what they want, as he’s already done by releasing Torres, or he can do the right thing, stick to his word about having the best fighters in the world instead of feeding us low-grade chumps, and get Torres back where he belongs.
Dana White has given us Karo Parisyan’s return and he gave us Nick Diaz vs. BJ Penn at UFC 137, even though he knew that we knew that he wanted to axe Diaz for missing those pressers.
So now, Mr. White, it’s your turn to give us what we want … that is, of course, unless you’ve finally stopped caring about the consumers that took the time to give a damn about your product.
Here’s a question that became very important, yet difficult to answer this week: If you’re a UFC fighter living in this wild world of social media, how do you know when you’ve crossed the line between edgy and irredeemably offensive? Better yet, how do you know when crossing that line will get you chewed out by your boss, and how do you know when you’ve committed an offense so egregious that it’s cause for termination?
Answer: You don’t. Not until it’s too late. Not until your fate is already sealed. And that, whether you think of yourself as a shockingly clever Twitter comedian or a press conference trash-talk specialist, is a problem.
It’s a problem for fighters, and it’s a problem for the UFC. It’s also a problem that has a solution, if the UFC cares enough about fairness and clarity to implement it.
As you probably know by now, two UFC fighters made the issue of sexual assault into fodder for their own attempts at entertainment this week, but with very different repercussions.
At a UFC on FOX press conference earlier this week, light heavyweight Rashad Evans referenced the Penn State sex abuse scandal when trying to zing former Nittany Lions wrestler Phil Davis. Meanwhile on Twitter, bantamweight Miguel Torres joked about “rape vans,” suggesting that if they were renamed “surprise vans,” maybe people would be more likely to ride in them.
Go out on the street and present these two cases to strangers who know nothing about the world of the UFC. See if they can guess which guy got fired, and which got off with just a stern talking to. I’ll bet you a six-pack of your finest domestic ale that more people guess wrong than right.
And honestly, who could blame them? At the risk of getting into the nebulous business of doling out offensiveness points for each remark, I feel pretty confident asserting that what Evans said was far worse than what Torres tweeted. Evans took a real situation, involving real, living children who have suffered through an unimaginable nightmare (here we insert that useful qualifier allegedly), and made light of it for the purposes of insulting a future opponent.
Torres? His tweet similarly made light of sexual assault, but at least he wasn’t using a specific incident involving living people as his springboard to comedy. At least he was dealing more in the abstract, and at least he didn’t say it while trying to promote a fight being broadcast by the UFC’s new network TV partner.
But really, that’s splitting hairs. Both guys messed up. Both should have known better, especially after Forrest Griffin made headlines with the exact same mistake very recently. But the consequences for Evans and for Torres were so bafflingly different, it’s hard to call it anything other than open hypocrisy on the UFC’s part.
UFC president Dana White told our own Ariel Helwani that he likes to decide these things on a case-by-case basis. He talks to the parties involved (or, in the case of Torres, has someone else talk to him and report back), asks them to explain just what in the hell was going on in their heads when they made these remarks, then decides on how to deal with them.
In the case of Evans, the explanation was that he got carried away trying to burn a college rival for the entertainment of others. This, apparently, was good enough. He got a lecture from White, and that was that.
In the case of Torres, he was trying to be funny. As anyone who follows his Twitter already knows, it’s something he strives for often, and he probably hits more than he misses. This time he missed, and it cost him his job. Could he have possibly known beforehand that this tweet would get him fired? Not really. He should have known that it might get him in trouble, that it was a bad idea and a pretty tasteless attempt at humor, but there was no precedent to suggest that a UFC fighter might lose his job for joking about sexual assault. Those jokes had happened already, but the firings hadn’t.
That’s the problem with the whole case-by-case basis method, as presented by White. Fighters are put in the position not of figuring out what’s right and wrong, or what’s a good idea and what’s a bad one. No, they just have to figure out how the boss is going to react, and that seems largely dependent on who they are and what they mean to the company.
Don’t believe me? Imagine for a moment that Brock Lesnar had sent out the exact same tweet as Torres. You think he’d be headed back to the WWE with his pink slip in his enormous hands right now? Not a chance. He’d have gotten a phone call from White and a slap on his enormous wrists, and that would have been that.
But Torres? He sends out a tweet that Michael Landsberg uses to surprise and embarrass White with on Canadian TV, and on the week of an event in Toronto? Screw him. He’s done.
Not only is that not fair, it doesn’t even serve the desired purpose. It doesn’t make UFC fighters in general more sensitive to what might offend others. It just makes them perform an internal calculus to assess their own standing and value to the UFC before they determine what they can get away with.
This is only part of the reason why the UFC needs a clear, consistent code of conduct for its fighters. It needs some formal policy that not only tells fighters in plain English (or Portuguese or Japanese or French, etc.) what not to do before they do it, but also what’s gong to happen to them if they do it anyway.
The UFC needs this not just for tweets and jokes and public comments, but also for more serious issues like drug abuse and criminal offenses. Anybody remember Vinicius Quieroz? He’s the Brazilian fighter who was released after one fight when the UFC’s independent drug tests nabbed him for steroid use. Meanwhile, Chris Leben tested positive for the same exact steroid on a different fight card, then tested positive for prescription painkillers Oxycodone and Oxymorphone in his most recent outing, and he got off with suspension in both cases.
That’s what you call a double standard. When two UFC employees can commit the same offenses and receive different punishments, it tells everyone — fans, fighters, media, sponsors — that this is not a level playing field. All are not equal in the UFC’s commonwealth. Some guys can be jerks and get away with it, while others get fired.
It’s not just a question of forcing the UFC to slap all the wrists equally. When White says he doesn’t see the point of reading some canned statement written by a lawyer just to mollify critics, he makes a good point. That wouldn’t accomplish much, and it would clearly be an empty gesture designed solely to get people off his back.
But neither does it help to apply a hazy standard of decency unevenly after the fact. If no one knows for sure what’s permitted and what isn’t, some people are bound to mess up without realizing what they’ve done. As of now, UFC fighters have no way to determine how the UFC will punish them, or even if it will punish them at all.
That’s not fair to the guys like Torres, who got made an example of even after previous examples got away with almost the exact same thing. It’s also not helpful to guys like Griffin or Evans, who have essentially learned that they can get away with the kind of stuff that will get the Miguel Torreses of the UFC world fired.
That’s why the UFC needs a code of conduct that spells out which infractions will result in which punishments. It needs to let fighters know where the line is before they’ve crossed it. It needs to let fans know that it’s serious about making sure fighters conduct themselves like professionals, and not just with smacking them around after the fact, with the force and severity of the blows dependent on how many pay-per-views they sell. It needs a little consistency and a little fairness. The sooner it institutes such a policy, the sooner it can stop some of this stuff before it starts.
Here’s a question that became very important, yet difficult to answer this week: If you’re a UFC fighter living in this wild world of social media, how do you know when you’ve crossed the line between edgy and irredeemably offensive? Better yet, how do you know when crossing that line will get you chewed out by your boss, and how do you know when you’ve committed an offense so egregious that it’s cause for termination?
Answer: You don’t. Not until it’s too late. Not until your fate is already sealed. And that, whether you think of yourself as a shockingly clever Twitter comedian or a press conference trash-talk specialist, is a problem.
It’s a problem for fighters, and it’s a problem for the UFC. It’s also a problem that has a solution, if the UFC cares enough about fairness and clarity to implement it.
As you probably know by now, two UFC fighters made the issue of sexual assault into fodder for their own attempts at entertainment this week, but with very different repercussions.
At a UFC on FOX press conference earlier this week, light heavyweight Rashad Evans referenced the Penn State sex abuse scandal when trying to zing former Nittany Lions wrestler Phil Davis. Meanwhile on Twitter, bantamweight Miguel Torres joked about “rape vans,” suggesting that if they were renamed “surprise vans,” maybe people would be more likely to ride in them.
Go out on the street and present these two cases to strangers who know nothing about the world of the UFC. See if they can guess which guy got fired, and which got off with just a stern talking to. I’ll bet you a six-pack of your finest domestic ale that more people guess wrong than right.
And honestly, who could blame them? At the risk of getting into the nebulous business of doling out offensiveness points for each remark, I feel pretty confident asserting that what Evans said was far worse than what Torres tweeted. Evans took a real situation, involving real, living children who have suffered through an unimaginable nightmare (here we insert that useful qualifier allegedly), and made light of it for the purposes of insulting a future opponent.
Torres? His tweet similarly made light of sexual assault, but at least he wasn’t using a specific incident involving living people as his springboard to comedy. At least he was dealing more in the abstract, and at least he didn’t say it while trying to promote a fight being broadcast by the UFC’s new network TV partner.
But really, that’s splitting hairs. Both guys messed up. Both should have known better, especially after Forrest Griffin made headlines with the exact same mistake very recently. But the consequences for Evans and for Torres were so bafflingly different, it’s hard to call it anything other than open hypocrisy on the UFC’s part.
UFC president Dana White told our own Ariel Helwani that he likes to decide these things on a case-by-case basis. He talks to the parties involved (or, in the case of Torres, has someone else talk to him and report back), asks them to explain just what in the hell was going on in their heads when they made these remarks, then decides on how to deal with them.
In the case of Evans, the explanation was that he got carried away trying to burn a college rival for the entertainment of others. This, apparently, was good enough. He got a lecture from White, and that was that.
In the case of Torres, he was trying to be funny. As anyone who follows his Twitter already knows, it’s something he strives for often, and he probably hits more than he misses. This time he missed, and it cost him his job. Could he have possibly known beforehand that this tweet would get him fired? Not really. He should have known that it might get him in trouble, that it was a bad idea and a pretty tasteless attempt at humor, but there was no precedent to suggest that a UFC fighter might lose his job for joking about sexual assault. Those jokes had happened already, but the firings hadn’t.
That’s the problem with the whole case-by-case basis method, as presented by White. Fighters are put in the position not of figuring out what’s right and wrong, or what’s a good idea and what’s a bad one. No, they just have to figure out how the boss is going to react, and that seems largely dependent on who they are and what they mean to the company.
Don’t believe me? Imagine for a moment that Brock Lesnar had sent out the exact same tweet as Torres. You think he’d be headed back to the WWE with his pink slip in his enormous hands right now? Not a chance. He’d have gotten a phone call from White and a slap on his enormous wrists, and that would have been that.
But Torres? He sends out a tweet that Michael Landsberg uses to surprise and embarrass White with on Canadian TV, and on the week of an event in Toronto? Screw him. He’s done.
Not only is that not fair, it doesn’t even serve the desired purpose. It doesn’t make UFC fighters in general more sensitive to what might offend others. It just makes them perform an internal calculus to assess their own standing and value to the UFC before they determine what they can get away with.
This is only part of the reason why the UFC needs a clear, consistent code of conduct for its fighters. It needs some formal policy that not only tells fighters in plain English (or Portuguese or Japanese or French, etc.) what not to do before they do it, but also what’s gong to happen to them if they do it anyway.
The UFC needs this not just for tweets and jokes and public comments, but also for more serious issues like drug abuse and criminal offenses. Anybody remember Vinicius Quieroz? He’s the Brazilian fighter who was released after one fight when the UFC’s independent drug tests nabbed him for steroid use. Meanwhile, Chris Leben tested positive for the same exact steroid on a different fight card, then tested positive for prescription painkillers Oxycodone and Oxymorphone in his most recent outing, and he got off with suspension in both cases.
That’s what you call a double standard. When two UFC employees can commit the same offenses and receive different punishments, it tells everyone — fans, fighters, media, sponsors — that this is not a level playing field. All are not equal in the UFC’s commonwealth. Some guys can be jerks and get away with it, while others get fired.
It’s not just a question of forcing the UFC to slap all the wrists equally. When White says he doesn’t see the point of reading some canned statement written by a lawyer just to mollify critics, he makes a good point. That wouldn’t accomplish much, and it would clearly be an empty gesture designed solely to get people off his back.
But neither does it help to apply a hazy standard of decency unevenly after the fact. If no one knows for sure what’s permitted and what isn’t, some people are bound to mess up without realizing what they’ve done. As of now, UFC fighters have no way to determine how the UFC will punish them, or even if it will punish them at all.
That’s not fair to the guys like Torres, who got made an example of even after previous examples got away with almost the exact same thing. It’s also not helpful to guys like Griffin or Evans, who have essentially learned that they can get away with the kind of stuff that will get the Miguel Torreses of the UFC world fired.
That’s why the UFC needs a code of conduct that spells out which infractions will result in which punishments. It needs to let fighters know where the line is before they’ve crossed it. It needs to let fans know that it’s serious about making sure fighters conduct themselves like professionals, and not just with smacking them around after the fact, with the force and severity of the blows dependent on how many pay-per-views they sell. It needs a little consistency and a little fairness. The sooner it institutes such a policy, the sooner it can stop some of this stuff before it starts.
Miguel Torres was fired for an insensitive comment made on twitter. Does this signify a paradigm shift in the way the UFC works?The UFC has been no stranger to controversial remarks and actions as of late.There was the incident where Quinton “Rampage” …
Miguel Torres was fired for an insensitive comment made on twitter. Does this signify a paradigm shift in the way the UFC works?
The UFC has been no stranger to controversial remarks and actions as of late.
There was the incident where Quinton “Rampage” Jackson “motorboated” MMA reporter Karyn Bryant, and there was the incident where UFC commentator Joe Rogan called reporter Maggie Hendricks, “cunty.”
There were even more bad things that came up later in the year.
These problems were swept under the rug by UFC brass.
In a recent interview, UFC president Dana White dismissed Griffin’s tweet as social commentary and Evans’ remarks as something born in the heat of the moment.
Torres’ tweet earned him no laughs and a spot on the unemployment line.
Does this mean that the UFC, who has always prided itself on not muzzling its fighters, has finally “grown up?” Is the UFC now policing its fighters more due to entering the mainstream? Are the days of Dana White’s t-shirts and foul mouth over?
It would seem like that’s the case, but it isn’t. Dana White himself has recently shed light on the issue.
Upon hearing that Torres’ tweet was just a joke, White wasn’t happy. “His sense of humor and mine are a little different, apparently,” he said.
“It’s just not something you tweet. … There’s no explanation for it. … Use a little common sense.”
However, White’s dismissal of Torres has nothing to do with the UFC’s deal with FOX and subsequent emergence into the mainstream.
“I’m not going to be pressured by the media, by the fans or by anybody else to go in and attack my guys when they make a mistake. I’m not going to come out with these canned written statements from our lawyers. We’re going to handle this thing honestly and…like everybody would in real life.”
“This is a very lenient company,” White said. “I’m very lenient and I’m very open-minded and I’m very realistic on what should be put on these guys as human beings. It’s such an easy place to work as far as your conduct and everything else.”
Torres’ expulsion from the UFC aside, it appears as though the company isn’t about to become the NFL in terms of the strict image its athletes and coaches are forced to maintain at all times (even the boisterous Rex Ryan isn’t immune from the wrath of the No Fun League).
Even though it’s unfortunate that Torres is gone (he was one of the few fighters with a truly excellent guard), it’s comforting to see that the UFC isn’t “selling out” and become bland and corporate like the other major sports organizations.
The UFC’s greatest strength is that it has a connection to the demographic like no other sport. This is in part due to the fact that White handles PR problems in his own way and not with the aforementioned canned legal statements.
Thus, Torres’ forced departure is just a hiccup on the UFC’s road to the top.
The company has already managed to attune itself to the zeitgeist of the current generation by not “playing by the rules.” Success is bound to follow, with Miguel Torres or without.
It’s been a whirlwind 24 hours for 
First of all, I like Miguel Angel Torres, and I’ll always respect him despite his often-ridiculous tweets, but even I’ll say I can see why Torres got released from the UFC.
Here’s a question that became very important, yet difficult to answer this week: If you’re a 