(“This damn knucklehead. Always saying what the rest of us are thinking. Ah, well.“)

If you read Kevin Iole’s follow-up on the Rogan/Hendricks situation that we linked on Friday, you’d know that Dana White initially did his best to avoid the topic altogether. Said DW: “Joe Rogan is an independent contractor and he wrote his opinion. And you are free to write your opinion of Joe Rogan’s opinion.”

White also released a statement on UFC.com clarifying that Rogan’s UG posts were not sanctioned by anybody but Joe himself, and they weren’t particularly appreciated by the company:

Joe Rogan recently made an offensive statement reflecting a personal opinion that does not represent the UFC in any way. I have addressed this directly with Joe.

Okay, so it’s more of a ‘tweet’ than the kind of drawn-out statement you’d expect from a company president — honestly, the dude ate up more of his data-plan feuding with Bloodstain Lane on Saturday night — but it was a necessary gesture during a moment when emotions were pretty high on both sides of the debate; even a columnist for the UFC’s hometown newspaper is now calling for Rogan’s head.

One more quote from the Yahoo! piece, and then I promise I’ll leave you alone about this shit:

[L]ate Thursday, UFC spokeswoman Caren Bell privately called Hendricks and issued an apology. And while it is commendable that the UFC offered any kind of apology at all, it was made privately at a time when Hendricks was under heavy siege publicly because she stood up for what was right. A public apology would have meant more and carried far more weight.

Well, Hendricks got her public statement from White, though I wouldn’t categorize it as an “apology,” exactly. And personally, I disagree that any public statement would have carried more weight than either Joe or Dana calling Maggie up immediately afterward and saying “Hey, sorry, that was out of line. We cool?”

Instead, we have a female vice-president of communications tasked with calling up Maggie and apologizing for Joe Rogan calling her “cunty,” which just strikes me as awkward and bizarre. For his part, Joe Rogan downgraded “cunty” to “bitchy” in his own apology on the UG. In the MMA world, we call that a happy ending.

(BG)