(“The Muscle Shark” finds your rhetoric weak and your platform disingenuous. He also thinks you’re a pussy.)

Considering their recent verbal assaults on one another, it’s almost a shame that B.J. Penn and Sean Sherk didn’t go into politics. Not only do they both have a gift for bashing their opponent, they’re remarkable when it comes to zeroing in on a message and sticking to it.

Sherk has been eager to characterize Penn as a quitter. Granted, he’s not the first to do so, but just to make sure that it sticks he’s been hammering the point every chance he gets, such as in a recent video promo on the UFC website:

“B.J. has a lot of natural ability, but so do I. I’ve got just as much natural talent as he does. The only difference is I’ve got the mental ability and the heart. Come fight night you’ll see that. I’m going to make him quit. I’m coming at him real hard and he’s going to realize, after that first round, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll get right up in his face and we’re going to fight. Mentally, I think he’s got some quit in him. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in the past. If you push him, he’ll quit.”

But Penn hit back recently by turning that same criticism against Sherk, like a page right out of the Karl Rove playbook:

“He’s been broken before, and he’s been broken bad by Georges St-Pierre. He got broken so bad that he moved down to the 155-pound division.”

See that? Sharp, succinct, and makes for a good sound byte. The McLaughlin Group would eat that up. But Penn didn’t stop there. He also attacked Sherk’s main talking points:

“His only hope is that he can take me into the later rounds and get me tired, but this is The UFC. This isn’t boxing and Floyd Mayweather where you can run the whole fight, where you ask people to pay $60 and then run away the whole fight. This is The UFC so we’ll come out to fight.

As an experienced fighter I shouldn’t say I want to take him out in the first round…but I want to take him out in the first round. I want to beat him by beat down, not by one punch but by beat down.”

Beat him by beat down. You can almost imagine that slogan on bumper stickers and t-shirts, arenas full of Penn supporters chanting it together.

‘Beat him by beat down. Yes he can.’

That’s how you hype a fight, people.