Josh Gross leaves Sherdog for Sports Illustrated

April 30, 2008 – 2:12 pm by fightlinker

I’ve always found the love/hate relationship between the UFC and MMA websites to be very amusing. Dana and the gang have never had a problem proving how much they fucking hate the peanut gallery bloggo-sphere, be it by denying credentials, actively throwing people out of events, suing over website addresses, or quivering with anger while discussing anti-UFC bias.

Most MMA internet sites still try to play nice in order to suck up to the organization while secretly crying at night asking “Why doesn’t he love me? Why won’t he stop hitting me?” We here at Fightlinker have always taken the opinion that the UFC will always treat us like shit, and therefore there will never be any massaging of Dana’s testicles on this site (unless he does something massage worthy like Fedor/Randy).

But there is one site above all others that Dana White hates, and that’s Sherdog. I’m not 100% sure how this all came about since when all this was going down I was in the Peace Corps distributing food to malnourished children in Africa (or smoking a lot of weed and playing Bubble Bobble nonstop, that period of time is a bit hazy). But let me tell you what I do know: Sherdog put up a video interview with a drunken Dana White which displeased the Bald One, resulting in pulled credentials. So Sherdog fired back by releasing the finalists for the Ultimate Fighter. And that’s pretty much where the hate grew out of. Other notable volleys include Josh Gross blaming Dana for that whole steroid thing that went down over the summer, and Dana White sending “I HATE YOU” text messages to Josh Gross.

But now Gross has gone from an organization that the UFC doesn’t give a shit about to one that the UFC drools over the thought of at night: Sports Illustrated. This isn’t the first time Sherdog has managed to get in good with a major sports news outlet – they became the content providers for ESPN.com last year. You might hope that this might mean some healing will happen and eventually we can all sit around a campfire singing kumbaya my lord. But that’s very doubtful, since Dana White’s hatred runs deep and Josh Gross has the same “Fuck me? No fuck you!” attitude we carry around here.