Special Feature
Brendan Fitzgerald: Comfortable With His Role On The Team
UFC Broadcaster Discusses First Six Years On The Mic, Goals For 2024
Dana White’s Contender Series has graduated a tremendous amount of talent to the UFC roster, including a pair of champions in Jamahal Hill and Sean O’Malley, impending bantamweight title challenger Mayra Bueno Silva, contenders like Jailton Almeida and Brendan Allen, and ascending stars like Maycee Barber, Karine Silva, and Jack Della Maddalena.
But perhaps the greatest impact the annual talent-search series has had over its seven seasons and counting is in the broadcasting department, as microphone mainstays Michael Bisping, Paul Felder, and Laura Sanko all garnered invaluable reps as analysts, and Brendan Fitzgerald went from calling alternating events with UFC Weigh-In Show host and current DWCS voice Dan Hellie during the first season to helming his first UFC broadcast towards the end of that same year.
“It’s weird,” Fitzgerald said when we sat down in Austin, reflecting on his first six years with the promotion, just ahead of the anniversary of the Fight Night event in Fresno, California that marked his official debut as a member of the UFC announce team. “What I find myself doing quite a bit on road trips is recounting fun stories from previous road trips with our production team, and the last sentence is usually ‘Gosh, that was five years ago. Can you believe that?’
2023 AWARDS: The Upsets | The Submissions | The Newcomers | The Knockouts | The Fights
“We went to Austin in early 2018 — an early show of mine — and we still have memories from fun things that happened, fights that went down, and we’re like, ‘Man, five years; five-and-a-half years at this point, almost six for that particular show.’
“So, in one way, it’s a whirlwind if you think about it from that perspective, but in another way, it seems like it’s kind of the progression of where I’m at.”
For Fitzgerald, a New England native who relocated to Las Vegas and has become a fixture on UFC broadcasts and a mainstay on various programs on UFC FIGHT PASS, including his own Fitz Nation podcast series, getting settled into the role came quickly for him, as working with familiar faces and bonding with the production staff allowed him to feel at ease with the execution of an event almost immediately.
But, as everyone knows, there is a great difference between feeling settled and feeling like you actually belong, and the latter didn’t really sink in until the midway point of 2019.
Order UFC 297: Strickland vs Du Plessis
“I never felt out of place, but I remember going for a walk in Greenville, South Carolina in June of 2019 and being like, ‘I’m buying what I’m bringing to the table now in a different way. I belong here,’” recalled Fitzgerald, who re-signed with the UFC towards the end of 2022, which will keep him in the booth and on shows like On the Line for the next several years. “I think that was a bigger weekend for me because the prelims were on ESPN, so it was the first time where it was like ‘I’m on ESPN today, and I belong on ESPN. And I belong calling fun Fight Nights, bigger events.’
“So, 2019 was the year where later in the year, I called the Zhang Weili-Jessica Andrade title fight in China. I called Justin Gaethje fighting Cowboy Cerrone in Vancouver, some higher profile Fight Nights; I called them and I felt like I belonged there.”
And if he wasn’t fully comfortable with his place on the squad ahead of 2020, the hectic pace of the UFC schedule during and following the pandemic has certainly further expedited that process.
“I don’t know if it was 2021 or 2022, but there was a stretch there with how the events fell at the APEX where I was working every other week for like four months,” said Fitzgerald, who tickled the ivories ahead of weigh-ins in Austin and again a couple weeks later on the UFC 296 Weigh-In show, showcasing his true renaissance man nature. “Two shows a month is perfectly good; that’s a good system, a good schedule. It never felt overloaded or sparse; it just felt regular.
“It certainly helps with taking away any anxiety,” he added. “Sometimes things get busy. Sometimes you’re doing a studio show for an upcoming pay-per-view, an On the Line betting show on Thursday, hosting weigh-ins on Friday, so there are times when you’re feeling over-stretched, but this is what it is: we’re gonna do an event on Saturday, and I’m gonna be as ready for it as I can, but I’m not gonna freak out because this other event that I had three weeks off before probably had a little more time to put into one thing.”
PART 1: See Where Things Stand In Each Division
Being more than six years into the role also helps take away some of that anxiety, as elements that once might have been challenging to navigate or difficult to organize have since been refined and streamlined, with experience providing a greater understanding of what is required, and how to go about ensuring preparedness for ahead of fight night.
Take pre-fight prep for instance.
“You find a system that works, and abide by the system,” began the broadcaster, explaining his approach to getting ready for an event. “Football coaches change their game plan each week, but the way that they prepare, they keep the same.
“You (streamline) things: for the next two hours, I’m looking at all the fighters on the card and making sure my information is up to date. The next day, let me watch the footage that I need to watch. The next day, let me watch all the features I can find or the Media Day interviews. Then it’s ‘Who do I need to talk to more?’ and at weigh-ins, I’ll talk to them.”
READ: Episode 7 Recap | Power Slap: Road To The Title Season 2
The same goes for having a sense of what needs to be communicated about different fighters each week, with the focus for veterans shifting to bigger picture ideas, recent results and adjustments, and how they’ve been carrying themselves throughout the week.
For newcomers, Fitzgerald has opted to approach it like fans watching an athlete for the first time.
“If a newcomer comes in, I’ve stopped trying to freak out about trying to know every single thing about every single person,” he said with a smile. “There are certain things I’m gonna find out just like fans are gonna find out.
“The more you do it, the more you know what you need to talk about,” he added. “Early in my run, I was trying to encapsulate a life story on every walk. You go big on information and that ends up leading to bad stuff, and it overloads people that are watching.
“There is a big “prove it” curve, and once you don’t need to do that, you get better results, but it’s part of the process.”
UFC Announces Details Of New Anti-Doping Program
The same way we ask every fighter “what comes next?” following each trip into the Octagon, I asked Fitzgerald about career goals that still remain unticked on his personal list of ambitions and accomplishments he’d like to achieve during his UFC tenure.
Unlike most fighters, “Fitzy” knew the question was coming and was ready with a quality answer.
“The easy answer is to call the highest profile shows, but that’s a backup quarterback saying, ‘I want to start games,’ so I’ve always been very aware to not say things like that because I love being on the team,” began the thoughtful play-by-play man. “The team we have and the quarterback room that we have, to continue that comparison: I love Jon (Anik) and John (Gooden), and so my biggest gripe is that I don’t get to see Anik as much as I would like to because we’re ships crossing in the night because of our roles.
“Calling high-profile events is one of the fun parts of the job, so I really like this event this week because it’s tangible progress: I haven’t called the Fight Like Hell, early December, ESPN, memorialize Stuart Scott night; I haven’t done that, so that’s a tangible thing where ‘in 2023, I took a step up and called this Fight Night that had been escaping me for several years because of the pandemic.’
“Looking to 2024, I would like to — and I don’t know how this will be received — display my personality a bit more,” he continued. “I think I’m entrenched enough in the world and I feel confident in who I am that I think I know what I can bring that will make things more entertaining, without being a ‘shine the light on me; this is a Me Show.’
“I think one of the things I do the best is sit next to Bisping and DC (Daniel Cormier) and be very aware that we’re here to listen to Bisping and DC, and I can do what I can do in my role,” added Fitzgerald. “I’m not gonna try to steal any spotlight, but, at the same time, on shows like On the Line or studio shows or shoulder programming, I want to have more fun with it without putting my foot in my mouth.”
A little more fun is never a bad thing, and given the multitude of talents Fitzgerald has, chances are he could probably literally put his foot in his mouth.
But please don’t, Brendan — we’d much rather hear you on the call.
Tags
