A Flying Visit To Fight Island...
When you get offered the chance to leave a snow-covered Stockholm in January, there is only ever one answer...
The Week
… has been spent in Abu Dhabi, of all places.
If you follow me on social media you’ll know I’m over here for the UFC 257 card, which is headlined by Conor McGregor. Like him or hate him, he’s box office.
I haven’t been outside of Sweden since the first week of March last year, just as the pandemic was taking hold. Travelling for the first time in such a long time was weird. You kind of get out of the habit of it, and there’s a whole bunch of new habits to be formed.
The Mask
One of them is around facemasks. Sweden hasn’t been using them so it’s been a bit of a culture shock, even if I have used them in public back home. Here they must be worn everywhere, and there are stern reprimands if you get up from your restaurant table without putting them back on.
The Bubble
To ensure that they can still rake in the TV dollars, the UFC has organised its events in a bubble. This means doing everything through them - flights must be booked through them, and they have block-booked two hotels on Yas Island for media, staff and fighters.
Busses shuttle between the two hotels and the Etihad Arena, where the fights will take place, and we aren’t allowed to come into contact with anyone outside the bubble. That means no going to a shop or bar, no talking to fans, nothing.
It’s bizarre. Under normal circumstances I’d be headed off the beaten track immediately, but if I do that here I’ll get kicked out of the hotel.
It’s ironic, when you consider that Dana White, the UFC president, is one of former president Trump’s (isn’t it great to be able to write that at last?) biggest supporters - there’s a good chance that if he wasn’t running these events he’d be the world’s biggest anti-mask, you-can’t-take-away-our-freedoms Covid denier out there.
The Dilemma
It’s weird being here, but not being here. I have no doubt that I am in the middle of a sports-washing machine, but I have very little way of comparing it to anything - I can’t get to see what real life is like here at the moment. I know about the legal systems, the punishments, the lack of LGBTQ rights, the lack of union representation, the works, but there’s precious little I can do to lift those situations without endangering people who would be easy to identify.
This evening I went to do an Instagram Live with some friends in Sweden and we couldn’t work out why I couldn’t join them - it turns out the site is blocked. The other day I wanted to read a press release about me that had come out in Sweden because of a project I did, and I couldn’t read that either - it was published by Sweden’s state gambling company, Svenska Spel, and gambling is of course illegal here.
When I go somewhere I try not just to bring readers and listeners and viewers the events I witness - I want to bring them behind the scenes and show them what life is really like. It doesn’t happen often, but I cannot do it here. That should make me appreciate the freedom I normally enjoy even more, but knowing that I’ll leave a lot of people behind on Monday who cannot enjoy it means I can’t.
The Podcast
Hasn’t happened this week, for a variety of reasons. Working with a week of mixed martial arts is essentially chasing a variety of moving targets. Things can happen now, later, or not at all, and seldom in the manner in which you expected them to. Normal service will be resumed next week when I get back home.
The Inaugration
… was something that passed me by. Four years ago I arrived in California a few days after Trump became president, and it was awful. It was like war had been declared on Black people and Hispanics and every other minority there, and that war went on for four years.
Today as I filmed the weigh-ins in Abu Dhabi a photographer friend who did Conor’s last fight with me in Vegas a year ago, the tremendously skilled Mike Blake, messaged me to see how I was and to tell me to enjoy the fights. If you Google “Mike Blake Reuters” you will see some of the iconic pictures he has taken. I shared an apartment with him at the Olympics once and I must have bored him to death asking about how he came to take them.
He lives south of Los Angeles and was telling me that everything has changed now that Trump’s war is over. I can’t wait to get back there when the pandemic subsides to see it for myself. I saw so much of the pain that his politics caused in the last four years, I’d like to see the healing too.
The Other Dilemma
Covering Conor McGregor is not easy. On the one hand you have a once-in-a-generation athlete who is capable of doing things that no martial artist has ever done before.
On the other you have a man who can behave like the lowest of the low. Somewhere in all that is the truth of who he is.
That truth has changed over time. Some things he has done have been inexcusable, but the last year or so have shown a greater sense of self-awareness, and not before time. He has alienated a lot of Irish people and a lot of sports fans, and many of them will never be won back. He has caused even deeper hurt and pain than any of them will ever feel, but we are not and may never be privy to the details.
But there are signs that he has moved on from some of his more repugnant habits. There may be more reckonings to come, but hopefully no more misdeeds, no more hurt, no more pain, for him or anyone else.
The Future
Every time you do a trip like this, one that takes you away from your family and has you working all hours of the day and night, you end up asking yourself the same question at the end of it - was it worth it?
For me, the answer is still yes.
It’s such a privilege to get to see these places (even in this limited way) and do these things. I am in awe of these athletes and coaches, but I am not afraid of them. I want to talk to them and find out what makes them tick. I’m not blinded by them, and I know just enough about what they do to be able to tell you something about why they do it.
As long as that keeps going, I’ll keep coming to places like this.
Now can we all just get vaccinated so I can take off this mask?
The Sign-off
Be good to each other and I’ll see you next week.