Former UFC light heavyweight champ, Ultimate Fighter season one winner and author, Forrest Griffin made the news yesterday by taking to twitter and subjecting his followers to a tasteless joke about rape.
“Rape is the new missionary” – Forrest Griffin
Let that one marinate for a second.
Just because it’s your job to get punched in the head for a living doesn’t give you a pass to make ridiculously offensive comments whenever you feel like it.
Like it or not, young kids idolize these fighters as modern day gladiators, and now that you can follow someone’s every bowel movement through sites like Twitter and Facebook, these young fans are getting exposed to comments like this. That at an impressionable age can be very dangerous.
To understand why we are even talking about Forrest Griffin, we need to look at where he came from. A former patrol officer for the Georgia police, Forrest was catapulted to fame in 2005 after his epic fight against Stephan Bonnar during the finale of the UFC’s first ever season of the Ultimate Fighter. Griffin rode his wave of fame and authored two books that were punctuated with his irreverence, dry wit and unique outlook on the world. More recently Griffin’s star has faded after a series of lackluster performances inside the octagon, which might be at the root of his “lashing out” over twitter.
The timing of this inappropriate e-outburst couldn’t be worse for Forrest’s bosses or the UFC. Griffin just received an award from his employers for being one of the “Most Creative” tweeters in the organization as the UFC held it’s first ever Twitter incentive program this fall.
The UFC’s president Dana White has always taken a hands off approach when it comes to it’s stable of fighters and their interactions with the media, “Everybody makes mistakes and everybody does things that are wrong sometimes. … We do the best we can do. How do you really think that we could possibly police 375 fighters and try to control everything they say?”
Everybody does indeed make mistakes, but when you are financially incentivizing your employees to interact directly with media and fans over social media, you need to make sure you have some control over what they are saying. At the end of the day, when these situations crop up, invariably it always blows back onto the UFC.
The tweet in question was posted on November 8th and has since been deleted by Griffin, but as the fighter tweeted just two days before this incident,
“I love twitter cus by the time you want to take “it” back “it’s” out there forever kinda like nude pics”
This isn’t the first time Griffin has been in hot water because of his “sense of humour” let’s just hope in the future, especially after the birth of his daughter, he learns to keep his inappropriate ramblings to himself. Also, the UFC needs to start muzzling some of its more outspoken fighters. Even though they promote their fights based on fighter’s personalities, if they ever hope to one day be ‘mainstream’ they need to start keeping a tighter lid on things.
