2010 Bloody Elbow Reader Awards: Personality of the Year

Chael Sonnen

Were you expecting someone else?

Jonathan Snowden already wrote a brilliant piece summarizing the year in Chael. Rather than regurgitating his work, I suggest you run off and read that.

Personally, I’ve yet to make up my mind about Chael Sonnen. I suppose it’s fair to call him a sleazeball. He certainly has all the makings of one. Politician. Real-estate salesman. Denies his own comments in the face of audio evidence. Spouts quasi-racism and xenophobia. Committed fraud involving a financial institution. Insists a commission executive approved use of a substance long after said executive denied having ever spoken to him. Blames a cancer survivor for his disease. There’s no doubt that Chael Sonnen is a sketchy individual, when looked at in even the best light.

Yet, there’s something so entertaining – and, dare I say, charming – about the man that quells my urge to spit vitriol in his general direction. That’s not to say that anything goes as long as you humor the audience. There are certainly entertainers that I find to be such despicable people – G.G. Allin is an example; Spencer Pratt, another – that I cannot look past the pure contempt that they stir within me. That line always exists somewhere, though we often cannot tell just where exactly it is and what it takes to cross it.

There’s just something about the way that Chael Sonnen twirls his trash talk that gives me the feeling that he’s giving you a wink-and-nod at the same time. As if he’s trying to let you in on the joke. Insults involving “pygmies” and selling “barbecued monkey on the street in Manaus,” comments that would raise my temperature in everyday life, instead generate a chuckle, a sigh, and a shrug of the shoulders, though not always in that order.

Perhaps there is a level of contempt involved. Perhaps Sonnen’s personality has become so grotesquely cartoonish that I find no other response appropriate to laugh. Laughing at him or with him, I’m not sure, but laughing nonetheless.

Full results after the jump.