Please tell me thats not a real tattoo

I can hold my head up high and know that I am real human being and I don’t need to take pot shots at others to make myself feel better or to make myself look better to future endeavors.

So all the things people from EliteXC are saying about him are just people taking pot shots to make themselves look better. It’s exactly what he is saying, people who are talking about his role in the company are just hating on him. Just because he isn’t naming names doesn’t mean that he isn’t passing the blame and responding to what people were saying about him, he seems to pass the buck for every bad thing that happens during the entire interview.

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I am not going to do an injustice to the sport by giving it a black eye if the fans just don’t want to embrace the Shaws. The one thing is that MMA is a very hateful circle; there isn’t a lot of journalism. I speak to you because I respect you. There’s a couple of other guys covering this sport that I respect a lot. But there’s too many bloggers in this sport. There’s too many people sitting in their cubicles, not doing their job, and when they are done with Facebook and Myspace, they are blogging on their own little Internet site or on some other forum. Unfortunately, because this sport is new, television executives have to go on the Internet and rely on the information they see, and a lot of times they see information that is inaccurate.

So it’s all the fan’s fault and the bloggers fault and it’s us talking on the internet that ruined his reputation with tv executives just because we don’t want to embrace the Shaws. Pretty darn arrogant right there. So we only hate him because he’s a Shaw? So the whole problem was all ignorant bloggers making up stories about him that weren’t true? Way to pass the buck.

So, that said, do you think you have been black-balled by the MMA community thus making it hard for you to ever work in this sport again?
Yeah, I believe in some way I have been singled out as the bad guy. Some people want to blame me for the demise of the company, but those that were close know the truth. I haven’t gone on the record with anybody because I don’t really have anything to say. I know what I brought to the table, and I believe in karma. I believe in what goes around comes around, and those that were responsible for the demise – and it’s not one person in general – they all know it and they’ve all felt it. I don’t need to point my finger at anyone.

First of all it’s pretty arrogant to think people are blaming him for EliteXC failing, most people think of him more as a symptom of the sickness as opposed to the guy who killed the company. Also pretty arrogant to think that he is being singled out here, there is plenty of blame to go around, people don’t seem to care for the guy because he comes off like a bad joke who got his spot through nepotism as opposed to blaming him for killing the company(like he had the power to singlehandedly kill the company). The bloggers have black balled him from the sport with their ignorant blogging and it was the “other guys” who were completly responsible for the collapse of the company.

In your opinion, was there any correlation between the demise of the promotion and the Seth Petruzelli "standgate" story following his shocking win over Kimbo Slice on October 4th?
No, absolutely not. And people want to link the demise of the company to the demise of the promotion. EliteXC was a healthy operating company. EliteXC was Pro Elite’s one golden nugget. The chest was big, and we were just one piece of it. And because EliteXC was in the public eye people think EliteXC lost 55 million dollars. EliteXC never had 55 million dollars to play with. The parent company may have.

So ELiteXC was a financially sound “gold nugget” and it was the other guys who ruined everything. Was ProElite secretly involved in some other business and that’s where all that money went? Was EliteXC ever actually making money?

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently during your time with EliteXC?
Yeah, get control of the 55 million dollars! (laughs). Obviously, I wish I wasn’t standing up when Kimbo got hit (by Seth Petruzelli on October 4th), and I wish that I didn’t have such a close, personal relationship with Kevin Ferguson (aka Kimbo Slice) that it looked like an injustice because it was never that. I am a straight shooter, I am very kosher.

So his one mistake that he wishes he could change was that he wishes he was standing up during the Kimbo vs Petrucelli fight. I guess everything else he did was great. Of course he goes on to say that it had nothing to do with the knockdown it was all a big misunderstanding. Perhaps him doing the same thing during the Thompson fight completly slipped his mind.

At the end of the day, my only regret is in that in that one instance that I know I did have control over, that I would have reacted differently

So that was the only thing that went wrong that he actually had control over, how amazing is that.