With the departure of Mike Goldberg, at UFC 208 the league tried a three-man three-man commentary team, consisting of UFC color commentator Joe Rogan, play-by-play commentator Jon Anik, and Daniel Cormier. During a recent appearance on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, Anik described the evening.
It was a challenging broadcast, said Anik to Ariel Helwani, as transcribed by Danny Segura for MMA Fighting. There were a lot of wrinkles that went into it. At least from a pay-per-view standpoint, there was a lot of sponsorship inventory, so I felt like every time I wanted to say something about fighting, you know, our stage manager would hand me a card of Halo Wars 2. I hope they paid the UFC a lot of money this weekend because I felt every word out of my mouth was Halo Wars 2, but it’s an interesting navigation with the three-man booth, particularly for mixed martial arts, a sport in which the line between play-by-play guy and analyst is blurred unlike in other sports.
There is a lot of real estate there, but it’s not uncommon in MMA to hear an analyst call out a left hand or a combination, so that line is blurred in MMA.
I did have a sensitivity to Joe and Daniel, and I wanted to make sure, as any good play-by-play would want to do, that those two guys would shine. I said when I was going in, that I was going to err on the side of not saying enough. If there was going to be any criticisms of me after this pay-per-view, it was going to be that I didn’t say enough. And I feel like in the Fight Pass prelims, I started to find my way a little bit and work my way in. But at the end of the day, dude, it’s just not about me, you know?
It’s about Germaine de Randamie and Holly Holm. And Joe Rogan is brilliant and has such an infectious energy about him. If I take myself out of it, and I put myself in Joe Rogan’s shoes, to his right is the UFC light heavyweight champion of the world and an Olympic wrestler, and to his left is a broadcaster. So if he was leaning to DC early on, or I was letting them have their way, I think that a lot of fans rather hear those two guys.
I know I heard from a lot of fans saying they wanted to hear more of me, and that’s certainly not a criticism that’s been levied at me in the past. I’m okay with it. I think UFC 209 will be a little bit better and I think it’s a work in progress, and what’s interesting is that we didn’t really have much to work with in these fights. There was one finish and there weren’t a lot of seminal moments to cap necessarily. So it’s a work in progress, but I think we’re happy to have that first one in the can.
The UFC plans is to continue with a three-man booth for future UFC pay-per-view events. The role of Daniel Cormier is expect to be played by former UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz at some points.
