Your dude Ben Fowlkes (that's me) now has a Substack about MMA, fight sports history, and whatever else I want to write about
Let me tell you a little about what I plan to do with this, and why it may be of interest to you, the discerning fight fan.
Fifteen years. Give or take. That’s about how long I’ve been making my living as a sports writer. The first thing I ever got paid to write was a cover story about a local MMA fighter for Missoula, Montana’s wonderful free weekly newspaper (RIP, The Independent). That was in, what, the summer of 2005? Seems impossible, but OK. The first real job I got was as the editorial manager for that rascally upstart MMA promotion known as the International Fight League in New York City. That was in the fall of 2006, and it took about three months for me to realize that the IFL itself and the job it had given me probably wouldn’t be around long.
So what did I do? Like everyone else in the mid-aughts, I started a Wordpress blog. It was called The Fighting Life – a combat sports nod to Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life,” because if fight fans love anything it’s an Annie Dillard reference – and it was mostly a repository for all the stuff I had to say about MMA and had nowhere else to put. It looked like this circa 2008.
(shouts out to the big homie Vrax, a frequent and erudite commenter)
I’m not sure I had much of a goal in mind. I think I wanted to prove to anyone in a sports media hiring capacity that I could write about this sport, for the inevitable day when my IFL job disappeared and I had to find something else. I also wanted to give myself a daily writing task that I would feel compelled to complete, since the only thing more pathetic than starting a blog is slowly abandoning one in full public view.
Maybe I thought it would pay off somehow, some way. I suppose it did, because it (along with the completely unpaid writing I did for CBS Sportsline and FOX Sports simultaneously) helped me land a job as co-editor of Cage Potato, which in turn helped me get the next job and the next one and so forth until, lo and behold, one day I looked up and realized I had this very strange career that I loved despite it being really difficult to explain to people at parties.
But now, after a few twists and turns in the ol’ career path, most of my income comes from podcasting. I love that too, especially because it’s something I do with one of my best friends, and also because the community that has sprung up around it is so smart and positive and encouraging that it makes me want to cry just thinking about it. But it’s also very different from writing. There’s something I miss about sitting down and hammering away at the keyboard about whatever’s on my mindbrain in the fight sports realm that day.
And if I can be real real with you? The truth is I’m just crazy enough to believe that there’s a place for actual writing about stuff, even if the stuff is as absurd as professional face-punching. There’s far less of that writing out there now than there used to be. There’s a fair amount of typing – mostly someone transcribing someone else’s interview, or else describing some fighter’s latest Instagram post, or explaining why two fighters are mad at each other on Twitter – but relatively little actual writing.
I suppose that’s an example of those, whaddaya call ‘em, “market forces” at work. That’s how it goes when you have to feed the click monster. It’s a bulk business, and that’s fine. I’ve even had a few recent job-type conversations with a few different websites that are in that business. And honestly? I don’t really want to do what they do, and they don’t pay enough to make it worth doing it anyway.
But stubbornly – maybe even stupidly – I still believe there’s some kind of audience, however meager, that might want to read something a little more substantial every now and then. Those are the people I would like to write for. I don’t even care if there’s not that many of them. Sometimes you just want to do the thing for the sake of doing it, you know? And sometimes you also find a way to make a few bucks at it later on.
So that’s what I plan to do here, with The Fighting Life redux. I’m going to write about what’s going on in fight sports. I’ll probably also write about what already has gone on, whether it’s five years ago or 100 years ago, since I love that stuff and I’m always amazed at how MMA seems to lack any sort of memory beyond the last six months. I may even write about stuff that’s only tangentially related. Might even mess around and resurrect the Twitter Mailbag on here. Screw it, it’s my Substack and I can do whatever I want. Maybe you’ll even come along for the ride.