CORRECTED: In Praise of GOAT UFC Shill, Kevin Iole

The truth hurts, which is why Kevin avoided it.

UPDATE: In the original version of this email newsletter, I incorrectly implied that Kevin Iole may have sought work for The Ring, I have no evidence of that and wish to apologize to Mr. Iole for any misunderstanding.

First up, let me say I have nothing personal against Kevin Iole. By all accounts, he’s a kind and loving dog owner, although his colleagues in both boxing and MMA media have had less kind things to say about his professional ethics and behavior.

We’ll get to those right away, but first…

Kevin won’t be surprised by this piece as he’s not been a fan of mine since Luke Thomas and I started shitting all over his work at Bloody Elbow in 2007.

At the time, Bloody Elbow was a brand-new blog on a basically unknown network with an audience of a few thousand readers a month, and Iole was writing for Yahoo! when it was routinely getting more traffic than Google.

We were just Davids slinging rocks at a very vulnerable Goliath, but the overall quality of Iole’s work never changed, and I’ve never lost my taste for calling bullshit when I smell it.

The dude has not only been a symptom but also a catalyst of the decline of sports journalism from the lofty heights it enjoyed at the beginning of his career three thousand years ago to the “what da fook is sports journalism?” lows it has rightfully reached today.

Iole didn’t just epitomize the very worst of MMA media; he also helped (to a great degree) shape the MMA media we know today.

Kevin Iole was doing access journalism before Ariel Helwani received his vaunted Syracuse J-school education.

Kevin Iole leveraged his Las Vegas residency to NOT dive in and get the important stories. While John Nash has made countless trips to Vegas, Vegas Man Iole never bothered to go to court to report on the Le vs Zuffa antitrust hearings. Instead, he platformed Paul Gift to carry UFC’s water.

Kevin Iole was too busy using his Vegas location to become Dana White’s most reliable stenographer, apologist, and mouthpiece. All the way until the very end.

Before he signed on at Yahoo!, Iole covered boxing for The Las Vegas Review-Journal, where he mastered access journalism as the hometown reporter when Vegas was the world capital of combat sports.

While some boxing heads insist Kevin Iole’s 1990s work was worthy, I can’t find any examples — and I fucking scoured the LVRJ archives long enough to feel like I’d gone mad from reading Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon in the original unspeakable gibberish.

The man who brought access journalism to MMA

Iole brought his habits of access journalism to MMA — something we never saw when the OGs at Sherdog and Full Contact Fighter were the only reporters covering the sport.

Naturally, it was Iole, the first full-time professional veteran boxing journalist to make a straight-up career move to cover MMA when it was the hot new thing that infected the sport with the access disease.

I’ve got to mention that Iole’s very hiring by Yahoo! (only months before they signed a major PPV distribution deal with the promotion) had been considered scandalous since back in the day.

Dana White finally kinda sorta admitted to buying pay-for-play coverage from USA Today/MMA Junkie in 2020. There was never evidence that Iole’s run at Yahoo! was paid for by the UFC.

Unlike Ariel Helwani, who went on a live stream and tearfully admitted to taking checks directly from the UFC while working for Fox Sports, Kevin kept his business dealings close to the vest.

The opportunity cost of platforming Kevin Iole

Possibly the worst part of Iole’s legacy is the space he took up. I could easily reel off a list of over a dozen other journalists working in MMA in the 2000s who would have made infinitely better use of what was then the biggest platform in the game.

Instead, I’ll limit it to this: Imagine if Jordan Breen had been allowed to introduce millions of Yahoo! readers to the sport he truly loved and whose story he was able to tell truthfully, warts and all.

But no, that plum assignment went to Kevin Iole, who excelled at stenography, spin, and sucking up to power and seemingly needed years of on-the-job training to even learn the basics of the sport.

It’s fair to say I’m not a fan.

‘The comedy of Iole’

I mean, to quote Fred Garvin, “the comedy of Iole is that he lived in Las Vegas. That was his only edge as a writer. He couldn’t be bothered to take a bus to the courts for any of the legal cases against the UFC. He wouldn’t even interview people.”

And that’s leaving aside this brutal, but pointed tweet Garvin made about Iole’s multiple soft focus eulogies for the late boxer Diego Corrales.

Contrast Kevin’s take with this Crime in Sports podcast episode on Corrales to understand the Iole gift for sanding off the rough spots until the true story is completely obscured and distorted.

So I’m going to do what’s called for on this occasion, I’m going to let Kevin Iole’s work speak for itself. Sorry if the truth hurts, Kevin.

But first, we’ll hear from a couple of what you might call Iole’s peers. Except, let’s be honest, this GOAT of UFC coverage truly has no peers and I’ll prove it behind the paywall.