Rogan expresses regret for Cormier interview
Joe Rogan: “I’ve said I don’t want to interview KO’ed fighters. And then I wound up doing it to someone I care a great deal about. D.C. Is a great man…”
Daniel Cormier has always been haunted to a degree by a concern that we mere mortals cannot imagine. He was never certain he was the best in the world.
Cormier competed in freestyle at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics, and lost the bronze medal match. In 2007 he competed again for a bronze medal at the world championship, and won. It seems incredible, becoming a world championship medalist; but you don’t become a world medalist being satisfied with bronze. In 2008 Cormier returned to the Olympics as team captain, but the weight cut caused his kidneys to shut down, and he was out.
He moved on to mixed martial arts, and won the XMMA belt, then the KOTC belt, and finally the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix. That GP may well have been better than the UFC heavyweight division, but still … Then Cormier entered the UFC and fought his way to a title shot vs. Jon Jones, but he lost for the first time.
When Jones was suspended for unfortunate out of competition behavior, Cormier became champ. But Bones always hung over the title, and when he returned, on Saturday night, he took his belt back, via a concussing head kick.
An overhead UFC Fight Pass camera caught Cormier nearly entirely disoriented, perhaps unaware the fight was over.
https://twitter.com/SandhuMMA/status/891740959440064512
And then at some point, as he began to come to, what happened must have hit him and Daniel Cormier broke down in tears. Color commentator Joe Rogan understood that something momentous was going on, and wanted to give Cormier an opportunity to speak to his millions of fans watching worldwide. Unfortunately, Cormier remained concussed to the point of incoherence.
Rogan expressed regret via his social network.
My apologies to @dc_mma and to all of you upset by my interviewing him after the fight. In all honestly I was kind of in shock.
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) July 30, 2017
“My apologies to Daniel Cormier and to all of you upset by my interviewing him after the fight,”
My apologies to @dc_mma and to all of you upset by my interviewing him after the fight. In all honestly I was kind of in shock.
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) July 30, 2017
” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>tweeted Rogan. “In all honestly I was kind of in shock. I don’t think I realized what I was doing until I actually had a mic in front of him. I’ve said I don’t want to interview KO’ed fighters. And then I wound up doing it to someone I care a great deal about. D.C. Is a great man and the whole thing was surreal. Again, no one asked me to do it. It was 100% my fuck up. Like I said, I was kind of in shock.”
Joe Rogan is a good person, trying to do right by the world, and he was trying to do right Saturday night. Expect that to be the last concussed fighter he interviews.