Ariel Helwani is the most dangerous man in MMA

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When the actor and stand-up comic Michael Rapaport walked onto the set of The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani the other day, it took him all of about five minutes to bring up the host’s reputation for getting into public spats. “Currently, how many beefs do you think you have?” he asked Helwani, who is likely the most prominent mixed-martial arts journalist and certainly as much of a character as those he covers. “I’ll say this: When you’re in beef, you’re like Biggie Smalls. You’re like Tupac.”

Helwani smiled: he seemed genuinely flattered. “Here’s the thing about beefs,” he began. “When someone has a beef, in my opinion, it’s a two-way street. And so, you ask me, ‘How many beefs do you have right now?’ The answer to that is: ‘None.’ Do you know why? Because I’m undefeated, undisputed!” he declared, the bragging cadence of a heavyweight champ lilting his voice. “Once I respond, they don’t come back for more.”

The two shared a laugh. But Helwani’s delight began to curdle, and he launched into a tirade about Dana White, the volatile president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship for impugning his reputation and punishing him for doing journalism. “I don’t like lies,” he told Rapaport. “People try to perpetuate lies about me, and that’s what really pisses me off.”

It was a rousing exchange, and for fans of Helwani, a familiar one. He and White, whose UFC is the sport’s dominant promotion company, have been scrapping for a long time. Still, though he recognizes those moments are viral catnip for his fans, he’s also trying to move beyond incendiary content and toward something more meaningful.

Yes, he’s still the go-to interviewer for the sport’s superstars such as Conor McGregor, who stopped by Helwani’s studio in lower Manhattan a couple of weeks ago when he was in the city. The encounter, which felt like old friends catching up, pulled in more than 1.2 million views on YouTube alone.

But over the past couple of years, after a mental-health crisis that spurred him to confront a lifelong anxiety for the first time – and then share that experience with his audience, a group that may not seem predisposed to listen to men discuss their fears and weaknesses – Helwani has developed into a deeply empathic broadcaster, whose interviews with fighters increasingly wander into fascinating and unlikely places.

On last Monday’s show, two days after defeating Marlon Vera in a split decision, the bantamweight fighter Cory Sandhagen revealed, under gentle probing by Helwani, how reading Carl Jung had helped him quiet an existential crisis.

A few days earlier, the fighter Jeff Molina had given an exclusive interview to Helwani about being outed as bisexual. Alexa Grasso cried when she talked to Helwani about her shocking upset win over Valentina Shevchenko. Leon Edwards wept in his first interview with Helwani after winning the UFC welterweight title last year. The featherweight fighter Andre Fili revealed to Helwani that he had got into fighting for “external validation,” that he had “actually hated myself most of my life,” and that only recently had he treated himself “like a person who actually deserves to be happy.”

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Helwani, 40, grew up aspiring to be the next Howard Stern, and he still harbours that dream. But as he continues to draw out the vulnerabilities of some of the most brutal people on the planet, he seems on his way to becoming the Barbara Walters of mixed martial arts.

And after playing a larger-than-life character since he got into the MMA game more than 15 years ago, he also now faces the very pressing business of figuring out how to be the real version of himself, in public, while he’s still learning who that is.

There’s a story that Helwani likes to tell about the moment he realized he wanted to spend his life covering MMA. He’d grown up a nerdy Jewish kid in Montreal, had gone away to Syracuse University to study sports journalism – alumni include Marv Albert and Bob Costas – and was back home in the fall of 2006 when he found himself in Champs Sports Bar, on Saint Laurent Boulevard, where the TVs were tuned to a UFC pay-per-view special. MMA, a full-contact sport in which fighters strike, wrestle, and grapple inside an octagonal cage – and in which they are judged, in part, on how much “damage” they inflict upon their opponent – was still banned in most of Canada, but the place was packed. As Helwani describes it, when the Quebec-born fighter Georges St-Pierre rained blows onto the head of Matt Hughes and scored a TKO to win the welterweight championship, “the place explodes like the Canadiens just won the Stanley Cup. And I’m like: ‘I want to be a part of this sport.’”

At the time, there weren’t many reporters with Helwani’s classical training and journalistic rigour covering the sport.

He started a website, JarryPark.com – a nod to the original home of the Montreal Expos – and began blogging about MMA, and doing video interviews with fighters. In 2009, he launched The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani as a video and audio show on AOL. Two years later, Helwani landed a gig as an MMA reporter for Fox Sports: The big time, but a poisoned chalice, because his salary was paid by the parent company of UFC. He hated the arrangement, because of the ethical conflicts it presented. Sure enough, when his objective and persistent reporting upset UFC, Fox cut him loose.

He’s sitting now on the set of his show, on the 15th floor of an office building in New York’s financial district, amid a warren of cubicles belonging to Vox, the online-media company that owns and produces The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani every Monday and Wednesday afternoon. The set, which Helwani designed, is an exposed-brick rec-room replica that’s choking on tchotchkes: dozens of MMA fighter bobbleheads, photos of fights and bloody faces, a Canadian and a U.S. flag (he and his wife, Jaclyn, who is also from Montreal, took out U.S. citizenship last year), Expos and Buffalo Bills memorabilia, and a Nottingham Forest jersey with Helwani’s name on the back, which was a gift from the English Premier League team that he and one of his sons began rooting for last year.

The studio lights have been dimmed. The crew went home a little while ago after wrapping up an edition of the show that clocked in at more than 4 1/2 hours, which included FaceTime interviews with three fighters and a coach, a long and lively in-studio segment with Michael Rapaport, a betting-focused segment (the sportsbook DraftKings is the show’s title sponsor), and a lot of kibitzing with a trio of the show’s producers, supporting characters who are younger than Helwani and therefore even more digitally native and meme-savvy than him.

He’s thrown on a hoodie from the Vancouver lifestyle company Roots of Fight, a pink number with Bret (Hitman) Hart branding. (As a kid, when he went to the doctor, he says, “I would be afraid of the shots, and my mom would say, ‘Close your eyes and think about what makes you happy.’ And it was Bret Hart that made me happy.”)

He says he’s pleased with how the show went, though he admits, “I’ve never left the show thinking, like, ‘I nailed that.’” And it hurt when he posted the lineup of guests in the morning and haters filled the comments. He takes that criticism personally, because he’s the one who books all of the guests, “and I think long and hard about what would make the best show.”

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Most fans are kinder; some even seek his advice on personal matters. Every Wednesday, he does a segment titled On the Nose, in which he answers viewer questions. (The name is a wink to both his notorious nosiness and, frankly, his Jewishness. Early on in his career, he says, “people were making fun of my nose, my appearance – and I always felt that, if you just lean into it, you can disarm, them, right?”) On that day’s show, someone had asked about the office etiquette of exchanging pleasantries with a colleague they briefly encounter 10 times a day.

“I get those all the time,” he says. After all, he’s been doing online video interviews for more than 15 years, so he’s developed in front of his audience. They feel a kinship. “The fans have seen me as a very raw broadcaster. Like, my foray into this, I was nervous, I was super skinny, I was awkward – you know what I mean? I didn’t come in as Mr. Broadcaster. I don’t have the Peter Mansbridge voice. I’m not that guy. I’m very much myself.”

That authenticity is one of the most valuable currencies in online media, and it can have impressive power.

In June, 2016, while covering UFC 199 in Inglewood, Calif., Helwani broke the news that Brock Lesnar, who was then contracted to the WWE, would be in a featured fight on the next UFC card. Dana White had planned to make a splash with the news, and was incensed that he had been scooped. He had Helwani and two colleagues removed from the event venue, and declared they would be “banned for life.” White told him, “We just put a bullet in your head. Your career is done.”

Helwani returned to New York, humiliated and distressed. On his next show, he wept while sharing the story of the incident with his fans. They rose up, and – after pressure from other members of the broader sports media as well – UFC relented.

Two years later, ESPN offered Helwani a job. “I called my dad, and I started crying. I wanted that for so long.” He co-hosted a pair of shows, hosted his own show, and did other MMA reporting. But even there, he couldn’t escape White. Shortly after Helwani signed, ESPN struck a US$1.5-billion, five-year deal for pay-per-view rights. Things got awkward. Helwani says the UFC boss instituted a range of punitive restrictions on him. (Representatives for UFC did not respond to e-mails and phone calls from The Globe and Mail this week seeking comment about Helwani’s allegations that White had targeted him.)

Helwani tried to ignore it. He also began taking on non-MMA assignments at ESPN when they came available – working as a basketball sideline reporter, hosting highlight shows.

It was one of those gigs that changed everything. In February, 2021, he got the call to work sidelines for a game between the Milwaukee Bucks and Indiana Pacers. “My contract was coming up, so I was trying to say yes to everything, because I thought I’d re-sign,” he explains. But he was “paralyzed by anxiety.” He, his wife, three kids and their bernedoodle Matcha had spent 11 months together, and he was terrified of leaving. COVID-19 vaccines were not yet widely available.

He decided he needed to talk to a therapist. “The first time we spoke, I cried my eyes out.” When he got to LaGuardia for the flight to Milwaukee, “I felt like I was having a panic attack.” He managed to get on the plane, worked the game and came home, with no ill effects.

He could have pretended it was a blip. He didn’t.

The episode prompted a wholesale reckoning. Helwani realized his life had been threaded with crippling anxiety, going back to at least high school. At Syracuse, he let his hair grow like Samson because he was too scared to go to the barber. He wouldn’t go to the cafeteria. “To this day, I can’t eat Blue Diamond almonds anymore, because that’s what I would have for dinner. Or Alpha-Getti, Chef Boyardee. I would just eat in my room and watch pro wrestling, watch UFC, watch basketball. Those were my friends.”

If his wife makes plans with another couple, she won’t tell Helwani until an hour beforehand, because she knows that otherwise he’ll just obsess over it for days. “I’m kind of resigned to the fact that that’s probably in our best interest,” he admits.

Every week during therapy, “I was having epiphanies,” he says. “It opened up these clouds in my brain. Because I was dead set on taking whatever ESPN was going to offer me, and staying.” He knew Dana White would hate it if he were to stay; the desire to stick it to his long-time antagonist kept him going. But he also realized that was a prison of sorts. He didn’t like the corporate compromises he witnessed.

He began talking to Vox about returning to his old home. “This place makes me happy,” he said. But rather than tie himself to just one company, he realized there was political and financial capital to be found in diversifying, so he wouldn’t be beholden to any single entity. He returned to Vox and The MMA Hour, and signed deals with other companies, too: a podcast for Spotify, hosting boxing events, covering WWE for BT Sport including this weekend’s Wrestlemania in California.

Last year, Helwani became a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, making his debut with a whimsical story about the World Series of Birding. He did a series of long-form interviews in the podcast The Ariel Helwani Show, with subjects ranging from the Peloton instructor who had helped him deal with his anxiety to Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. And last month he launched a weekly basketball podcast for Showtime Sports, bringing him back to the first sport he fell in love with.

Meanwhile, having “broken the seal” with his revelations about his own anxiety, he’s painting with a more varied palette in his interviews on The MMA Hour. He’s also incorporating more elements of his real self in his on-screen persona.

Still, he admits to a growing ambivalence about what he does for a living. He’s haunted by the fact that his idol, Howard Cosell, grew to despise the sport of boxing and called for its abolition at the end of his career. “There’s definitely times where, now that I know how the sausage is made – and not only that, getting to know a lot of the fighters personally, and getting to see how little they’re left with, and the injuries, and the lack of pay – all that leaves me feeling,” – he takes a deep breath – “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder, am I part of the problem? Am I desensitizing people to [the damage]? I don’t know.

“But man, I don’t know if this is the right thing to say, but I almost feel like a sense of duty to the fighters,” he adds. “I feel I’d be letting them down if I left.”

What would it mean to leave after all this time, anyway? When the camera or the microphone is on, Helwani is gregarious, fully engaged. “I feel much more comfortable doing that,” than trying to connect with people without an audience, he says.

Whenever he does leave, more than anything he wants it to be on his terms. A few months ago, while Dana White – yes, him again – was talking to the fighter Paddy Pimblett, White took some swipes at Helwani, suggesting that he’s no longer relevant after leaving ESPN. Helwani’s fans flooded the comments, but Helwani admits it got under his skin. “No, you don’t get to decide if I’m relevant or not,’” he said, as if speaking to White. “This is all the fuel that I need. Like, my anxiety, my fear – all that is the engine that keeps me going. ‘I’ll prove you wrong.’”

And there’s still a lot of joy to be had. Back in February, Helwani was in Montreal to cover the WWE Elimination Chamber event for BT Sport. He stayed with family, and his father drove him to the gig. “My dad used to tell me all the time, ‘Don’t watch [WWE], this is dumb, why are you watching this? You’re a smart boy.’ And there he was, dropping me off at the Bell Centre. Amazing!” He picks up his phone to show a TikTok of himself and Georges St.-Pierre ringside. “That’s me!” he says. “I don’t belong there! You know what I mean? I have these moments where I’m like, What is this life?”

He glances again at his phone, and smiles slightly: His six-year-old daughter has texted to ask when he’ll be coming home.