If you ask Ultimate Fighting Championship color analyst Joe Rogan what it’s like being a professional commentator, the answer you receive might surprise you.
“I’m not really a professional sports broadcaster,” he explains. “I’m like a professional fan who knows how to explain what’s going on in the fights.”
Rogan’s description of himself, although understated, is an accurate one of how he got his start working with the UFC.
With no prior interviewing experience, he was hired by then-UFC ownership company Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) to conduct the post-fight interviews at UFC 12. Rogan was a stand-up comedian who was also an actor on the popular sitcom NewsRadio at the time and SEG producers figured the longtime martial artist and mixed martial arts fan would be a natural for the role. Their hunch was correct but had he not been as prepared as he was, Rogan says the experience could have been a disaster.
“My manager was friends with Campbell McLaren, who was one of the producers from SEG. They needed someone to do interviews and they just happened to find out from having a conversation that I was a huge fan of the UFC. It was a crazy last-minute thing. Nobody told me how to do it. Nobody asked me if I knew how to do it. They just handed me a microphone and told me to interview the fighters after the fights,” Rogan reminisces. “It was really weird. Back then it was very chaotic. Things were very unorganized – nothing like the well-oiled machine that Zuffa runs today. Luckily for me and SEG, I really was a fan. I knew a lot about the fighters and I prepared questions for them and I worked hard at it so everything worked out.”
Besides conducting Vitor “The Phenom” Belfort’s first North American televised interview, the most memorable exchange of his first event Rogan says was his Q&A with newly-crowned UFC inaugural heavyweight champion Mark “The Hammer” Coleman.
“I interviewed Coleman right after he choked out Dan Severn and I was nervous as hell. He was amped-up with a big frown on his face and he was heaving and sweating. It was intense,” he says. “He was the baddest man on the planet back then and I was this dorky kid in a blazer interviewing him. Thankfully he was a nice guy and it all worked out well.”
As his acting and comedy careers began to really take off, SEG’s financial stability began to plummet. Assuming the end was near for the struggling promotion and having turned down jobs that paid much more than his UFC gig did, Rogan made the difficult but necessary decision to walk away from the company.
“Working for them back then was costing me money because I was turning down comedy gigs to do UFC events and the comedy gigs paid more,” says Rogan. “It was costing me a few thousand dollars for each event and I was like ‘I have to stop doing this’.”
He continued to follow the UFC after he left. The promotion now had viable competition, including a fledgling promotion from Japan, PRIDE FC, that featured several former UFC veterans including Coleman and UFC 17 champion Dan Henderson. As much as he thought the company would likely dissolve as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, he hoped that a financier would emerge to save the company with so much potential that lacked a proper business model. In 2001 he got his wish.
“Me and my friends used to sit around talking about the future of the organization but we were talking hypothetically. One thing I remember saying was ‘Wouldn’t it be great if some super-billionaire dudes who were huge fans of the sport bought the UFC and spent millions of dollars to get it on TV and got it to the point where mainstream America was aware of what it was?’ That was a pipe dream,” Rogan recalls. “We never thought that would ever happen. When Zuffa came along we were shocked because that was exactly what we said needed to happen for the UFC to become successful. Along came these guys who were these super-billionaires who were fans of the sport. It was the craziest instance of a best-case scenario becoming reality. That’s what Zuffa is. They’re what every fan dreamed of – someone who would take this incredibly exciting sport and propel it into the mainstream.”
From attending events, Rogan met and became friends with new UFC president Dana White and owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta and was made an offer that although at first he was reluctant to accept, he knew couldn’t refuse.
White asked him to come back to work for the company in a larger capacity as the broadcast color commentator for UFC 37.5. Despite some reservations, Rogan agreed to once again wade into unfamiliar waters. As he did five years prior, he rose to the sink or swim challenge and has been Octagonside calling the action ever since.
The secret to his success and the reason why MMA fans enjoy his analysis he says is because he isn’t as polished and artificial as some of his contemporaries and he speaks like a regular guy and the fan that he is.
“I hate listening to a lot of commentators because they seem sterile – like their words are sterile. They play the role of a sports guy with that certain inflection and intonation that guys like that use and they have a way of speaking that you would expect from a doctor when you meet him in his office. He wouldn’t greet you by saying ‘Hey dude. What’s going on brother? You ready for this surgery? Let’s do this s—t’. You expect him to talk professionally,” he explains. “I guess that’s OK for some sports but for the rawest, purest, most honest and most emotional of all sports, to me I would much rather hear a guy like Bas Rutten who knows what he is talking about and shoots from the hip. Bas talks like a man who is honest about what he is seeing and how he feels about the fights. That’s how I’ve always approached commentary.”
As for his UFC broadcasting counterpart, who introduces him every show with the familiar “As always, with me is my partner Joe Rogan” Joe says Mike Goldberg is a consummate pro who is a different breed than the over-the-top radio disc-jockey voiced commentators that have become the norm in other organizations.
“Mike is a professional sports broadcaster and he is awesome at what he does. He’s so smooth. There’s nothing artificial about him and his voice is his natural voice. One of the nice things about working with him is that we’re actually really good friends,” Rogan says. “I actually look forward to seeing him at every show. I love the guy, so working with him makes my job easier and a lot of fun.”
Rogan asserts that he doesn’t consider what he does a job since he enjoys it so much and says that he still gets as excited about each show as he did his first.
“I look forward to every single show. Today is Monday and I can’t wait until Friday because on Friday morning I get to hop on a plane and go to Vegas do the weigh-ins and do press and get all amped-up. Then on Saturday night are the fights. I can’t wait,” he says. “I feel like I’m the luckiest man in the world that I have a job that isn’t even my main job where I get to do commentary on the greatest sport in the world. How this ever happened, I have no idea. How I became an expert commentator for the number one mixed martial arts promotion in the world, I’ll never know.”
A black belt in tae kwon do and a brown belt in jiu-jitsu under Eddie Bravo, Rogan, who was rumored to face actor Wesley Snipes in an exhibition fight in 2005, doesn’t see himself ever competing in MMA. The 41-year-old is toying with the idea of entering some grappling competitions, but says fighting is better left to the pros.
“I think MMA is the highest level of sport and it isn’t something you can just dip your toes into. Grappling competitions are totally different than MMA. I’ve rolled with some really good guys and you just tap out if you get in trouble. It’s not that bad. Other than the Wesley Snipes thing, I’ve never thought about doing it and the only reason I thought about doing that was because I was confident he had no clue what the hell he was doing. I don’t pretend to be some badass because I’m not. I’m a legitimate brown belt and I have been for a few years now. I train with some really good guys in standup and I kick boxed for many years,” Rogan says. “For me, it was a chance to make a ridiculous amount of money and to get my hands on some actor and choke him out. There are a lot of delusional people in the acting world. That world fosters delusional thinking. You’re the main person on a set of hundreds of people whose quality of life and how much money they make is dependent on how you perform. Of course they are going to kiss your ass and tell you how great you are. You’re around yes men your whole life and you think you’re a badass who trains and spars with decent guys and you have a six pack so you think you’re invincible.”
The former host of Fear Factor and The Man Show now makes his home in Colorado where he moved a few months ago with his longtime girlfriend and a baby daughter who was born last summer. After living the past several years in Los Angeles, a city he refers to as being “full of people who want to be famous without doing anything to become famous” the New Jersey native says he wanted to raise his daughter in a healthy positive environment and that he has found that in his new home. Despite being far removed from the paparazzi-laden streets of L.A., he hasn’t escaped the smite of Internet rumormongers.
Chuckling, he recalls a fabricated story he read online that stated his reason for the move to the mountains was a much more somber one.
“I read somewhere that I was a member of the New World Order, which is why I moved to Colorado to prepare for [the supposed end of the world in] 2012. I’ve heard some pretty funny ones. I’ve heard that I’m a member of the Illuminati. I heard that I was beaten up by in a bathroom by [former PRIDE commentator] Stephen Quadros. I’ve met Stephen a handful of times and said hello when I saw him but that’s about as far as my interaction with him has ever gone. Another one I’ve heard is that I’m a government disinformation agent which is why I’m always talking about ridiculous things and conspiracy theories,” Rogan laughs. “The Internet is awesome. I think there is something really funny and entertaining when people make stuff up about someone and post it online and people run with it. There’s something entertaining about the fact that one anonymous person from their keyboard can start some ridiculous rumor. It’s the nature of the beast. The internet is this open freeform communication platform in which anyone can communicate with the whole world. Now when I hear a rumor someone started about me I go on my blog or on a message board and I can quash the rumor before it grows. That’s the beauty of the web; it’s instantaneous. You just have to take the good with the bad like fake stories about Stephen Quadros kicking you in the head in a bathroom.”
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