Head Kick Legend founder Dave Walsh and I have taken the leap into the podcast game with Ring Psychology. We intend to cover the world of combat sports, from MMA, to kickboxing, to boxing. With that in mind, who better as our first guest than the extraordinary announcer Michael Schiavello?
“The Voice” of HDNet covers all the major events from Japan and some fun regional shows throughout the United States. Somehow in the midst of that busy schedule, he manages to sit down with the most interesting people in the sport for his Voice Versus series of one-on-one interviews and even squeezes in podcasts like ours. Schiavello talked candidly with us for almost an hour about K-1, Roger Huerta, his own street fight, why the media ignores HDNet programming, and his thoughts on Chael Sonnen. Here are just a few of the highlights:
On The Voice Versus Tito Ortiz: Tito was a very good interview subject. It was actually the first time I’d met Tito. I had never met him before we did the interview. It was a little different, because the two previous Voice Versus, against Rogan and against Mayhem-both guys I considered friends. I’d spent a lot of time with Joe and we’d hung out in Sydney and we’d hung out in Edmonton. Mayhem, as you know, I’ve commented with over in Tokyo and in King of the Cage, so I knew Mayhem very well. But I didn’t know Tito from a bar of soap. I was able to bring up various topics with him, including asking him about the incident that went on with Jenna earlier this year, asking about his thoughts on Dana White and stuff that had happened between him and Dana in the past, asking his thoughts on other fighters-inside and outside of the UFC. There’s another particular question that I asked him that I don’t want to give away…but it’s a little bit of knowledge about Tito that I wanted to get confirmed or denied by him. There’s some really juicy stuff in there… I think you’ll see in the Tito interview, the chemistry that exists between myself and Tito is very, very different than that you saw between myself and Mayhem or myself and Rogan.
On the viability of HDNet and working for Mark Cuban: The network is actually buying programming. They are forking out money for new and innovative programming, which is always an indication that a network is going well. When they stop buying new programming, when they stop investing in new programming-that’s when you have to worry about a network. But HDNet is going strong. Mark Cuban watches ever single show on HDNet. This is something that freaks me out. Because you think ‘well, Mark Cuban’s out there bidding $350 million for the Texas Rangers, he’s out there looking after the Dallas Mavericks, as well as the other hundred companies he’s got. He’s one of the richest men around. You’d think he wouldn’t pay much attention to good old HDNet. But from our biggest shows on there all the way down to the Ring of Honor wrestling Mark Cuban watches every single minute that is broadcast on HDNet. Trust me on this.
On promotion wars and hardcore fans: I love UFC. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a UFC hater, I love UFC. I try to watch as much of it as I can. Rogan and Goldberg is my favorite commentary combination doing MMA-I love watching UFC. But people who are just so blind…and think the world only revolves around UFC and everything else must be compared to the UFC-it’s ridiculous. There’s no reason why we have to compare organizations. The fact of the matter is, we should be very appreciative that we live in a day and age where we get to see UFC on SPIKE, we get to see Strikeforce on Showtime, we get to see DREAM/Sengoku/MFC/XFC/King of the Cage on HDNet-we get to see every bit of the best MMA and standup in the world across the various networks. Let’s celebrate that point.Let’s embrace it. Let’s try to help build it even further for future fight fans. Rather than everyone trying to stick the knives in and say ‘Well, you know what? UFC is the biggest and everyone else is small time so forget it.’ Or ‘King of the Cage roster is horrible and small, why would we bother to watch it? Strikeforce’s roster is really limited. Just watch UFC.’ That’s a ridiculous opinion to have. As a fight fan, you should be relishing every single fight that is on television.
This is just scratching the surface. Schiavello and Walsh had a great conversation about kickboxing that he will tell you about on Head Kick Legend, the best site by far for kickboxing news on the entire internet. Check out our podcast and let us know what you think. You can listen to it streaming at Angry Marks or download it on ITunes.