(You guys know this thing doesn’t even count, right?)

When the Nevada State Athletic Commission ruled yesterday to change Karo Parisyan’s decision win over Dong Hyun Kim at UFC 94 into a “no decision” on account of the various painkillers running through Parisyan’s veins at the time of the fight, I wondered the same thing I always wonder: how does this affect me?

As you may recall, I put a bet down on Kim when I was going crazy in Vegas the day before UFC 94.  I lost and was forced to dance for nickels under a bridge just to get enough money to make it home.  But with the bout result changed, did the MGM Grand now owe me my money back?  Were they also on the hook for the price of the tetanus shot I had to get when I got home (those nickels aren’t clean, no matter what anyone tells you)?  

I didn’t know, so I called the MGM Grand.  Turns out, they didn’t really know either.  After a lengthy back and forth, they gave up and told me to call the sportsbook at the Mirage, whose policies the MGM Grand follows on this sort of thing.  So I did.  I called the Mirage and got transferred around a bunch.  I got told several different times that the sportsbook didn’t take calls, but my question confused enough people, and eventually they put me through to the sportsbook, where my hopes were immediately shot down.

If you’ve ever wanted to see what a Nevada State Athletic Commission hearing looks like from the inside, you might be interested in these videos (courtesy of CageWriter), which show Karo Parisyan getting reamed for his painkiller use, Phil Nurse defending his own reputation, and BJ Penn crying for justice.  In the above clip, Karo explains why he took those unapproved meds, and throws himself on the mercy of the commission. The "drifting in and out of the state of reality" line comes at 5:54, and the ruling begins at 7:48, where Commissioner John Bailey lays down the suspension and fine, and suggests that in the future, a mixed martial artist’s entire win bonus should be forfeited if he tests positive for banned substances.

Below, Nurse admits that in retrospect, his use of Vaseline during the St. Pierre/Penn fight "doesn’t look good," and gets grilled about it while BJ Penn stares him down at the other end of the table. After the jump: Penn comes out against all forms of cheating, one commission member basically calls bullshit on the idea that you can ingest something that makes you slippery, and another is just glad that GSP didn’t beat him to death. Plus, Penn’s lawyer Raffi Nahabedian calls for a full-scale investigation on Lubrigate.

(If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.)

B.J. Penn brought the big guns to today’s hearing with the Nevada State Athletic Commission.  Not only did the Hawaiian have his lawyer on hand to go over his twenty-page complaint, Penn’s mother, Lorraine Shin, got up and read a statement that, according to MMA Weekly, “accused the Commission of not doing its duty to protect fighters.”

That’s right, Penn brought his mother.  And she was allowed to deliver a statement for some reason.  Apparently someone was worried that this whole greasing scandal thing hadn’t gotten ridiculous enough yet.  Problem solved.

(Parisyan was also "strongly encouraged" to get an eyebrow-wax. Photo courtesy of UFC.com.)

It seems like our earlier post on today’s Penn/St. Pierre NSAC hearing contained a bit of foreshadowing. Yes, fights in Nevada can be overturned if one of the fighters was using banned substances, and Karo Parisyan just learned that the hard way. "The Heat" was busted last month after testing positive for three different painkillers following his three-round snoozer with Dong Hyun Kim at UFC 94. Well, the verdict has finally come down, and Parisyan has been nailed with a nine-month suspension, a $32,000 fine (40% of his total purse), and the official voiding of his split-decision victory against Kim. That fight will now be known as a "no decision," which means that Kim is still technically undefeated. As Sherdog reports:

(The greasing heard ’round the world. Photo courtesy of NBC Sports.)

Following repeated arguments from BJ Penn that Georges St. Pierre‘s cornermen improperly used vaseline during their UFC 94 fight in January, the Nevada State Athletic Commission will meet today in Las Vegas at 9 a.m. PT to discuss what action, if any, should be taken against Phil Nurse and Greg Jackson.

Though Penn wants the fight to be changed to a no-contest, that scenario is unlikely; as NSAC executive director Keith Kizer explained to Sherdog, an MMA bout in Nevada can only be ruled a no-contest after the fact if scorecards were added incorrectly, if a referee or judge was paid off to influence the fight, if the referee misinterpreted a rule that effected the fight’s outcome, or if there was the use of non-approved drugs or steroids. Kizer explained that the actual purpose of today’s hearing was to prevent controversial greasing situations from happening in the future:

(He will litigate to the death, and he is not joking about this.)

Well, he finally went and did it.  After weeks of less structured, though more entertaining gripes and accusations, UFC lightweight champ B.J. Penn and his camp have filed a formal complaint with the Nevada State Athletic Commission against welterweight champ Georges St Pierre.

The Penn camp filed a twenty-page document (so take that Jackson camp, with your puny seventeen pages) detailing the complaint and outlining the consequences they’d like to see.  And what are those consequences?  You know the usual.  They just want to see GSP, his trainers, and other as of yet unnamed parties fined $250,000, have the bout result changed to a no contest, suspend the licenses of GSP, Phil Nurse, and Greg Jackson, and force GSP to undergo pre-fight showers.  Basically just the regular old stuff.

The complaint also accuses St. Pierre of “ingesting a substance” to make his body especially slippery before the fight.  It makes us wish the formal hearing really does happen so we can hear Penn’s lawyer accuse GSP of drinking baby oil, and then hear GSP’s lawyer counter that baby oil is considered a delicacy in certain French-Canadian circles.

It’s in your hands now, NSAC.  Please do something and put an end to this epic paperwork war. 

(‘Don’t even come in here with your faulty premises and negative proof fallacies, dude.  Just don’t.’)

In a response to B.J. Penn’s request for the Nevada State Athletic Commission to investigate Georges St. Pierre’s use of Vaseline in their main event bout at UFC 94, the Jackson camp has fired back with an exhaustive argument refuting any accusation of wrongdoing.  

As reported by Sherdog and the L.A. Times (which has a PDF of the full response), the Jackson camp provided seventeen pages of documents explaining what happened, why it wasn’t an intentional attempt to cheat, and why it had no bearing on Penn getting his ass handed to him.

A statement signed by Greg Jackson and Phil Nurse details the breathing technique used on St. Pierre between rounds and insists that video evidence shows only a “scant amount of Vaseline” ever found its way to GSP’s body.  It also lays out four recommendations for improving the NSAC’s policies to avoid the greasing question in the future, including wiping down fighters before every round and using a “touch test” to see if they are unnaturally greasy.  And of course they conclude by referring to Penn’s griping as “a desperate attempt to protect [Penn’s] reputation and commercial value after being totally dominated by a superior athlete.”

Oh.  Snap.

(Photo courtesy of 5oz.)

Following his bust for three unapproved painkillers following UFC 94, Karo Parisyan was hoping to take his suspension and try to move on with his life. Unfortunately, he’s still stuck in punitive limbo, as he was informed in a Nevada State Athletic Commission hearing yesterday that a final decision regarding his positive drug test won’t be announced until next month. Though Parisyan is still under a temporary suspension, his actual suspension will be retroactive to January 31st; in other words, it won’t begin on the date that the final suspension is determined, which is good news. Still, the uncertainty isn’t exactly helping the Heat’s panic-related issues. As he told MMA Junkie:

(Photo courtesy of MMA Junkie.)

Shortly after Karo Parisyan’s unfortunate post-UFC 94 drug test results were released, the Heat expressed frustration at his situation, telling MMA Weekly that he’d revealed all his medications before the fight and was under the impression that he was not in violation of any rules. But Nevada State Athletic Commission executive director Keith Kizer has contradicted Parisyan’s account of the events, spurring the troubled UFC welterweight to sort of change his story. Now, Parisyan says his complete honesty about his painkiller use didn’t happen until after after the fight:

Apparently, that’s not a good enough excuse. Regarding Parisyan’s statement that a prescription would absolve him from punishment, Keith Kizer was dismissive:

(‘Okay…this is…way worse…than I…expected.’)

After deciding not to lodge a formal complaint against Georges St. Pierre and his cornermen over UFC 94’s greasing incident, B.J. Penn’s camp has sent a letter to the Nevada State Athletic Commission formally requesting an investigation, according to NBC Sports:

The letter was sent by Penn’s lawyer Raffi Nahabedian to Nevada state athletic commission executive director Keith Kizer. In the correspondence, which was given by the commission to NBCSports.com, Nahabedian states that the letter is not a formal complaint, but asks the commission to ensure that St. Pierre and his cornermen are "properly dealt with."

Consider this the Penn camp’s way of saying, ‘We don’t want to look like whiners complaining about this, but we don’t want to let GSP off the hook, either.’  And just when you were hoping this thing would die down and we could all move on to other topics.  Sorry.  This is only getting started.

On a related note, Dana White spoke with our friend MDS over at MMA Fanhouse about the incident, and summed it up thusly:

(“Indeed I did have a relationship with methadone that was not appropriate.”)

In a letter received by the Nevada State Athletic Commission yesterday, James Irvin admitted using methadone and oxymorphone prior to his July 19th beatdown at the hands of Anderson Silva; Irvin had tested positive for the heavy-duty painkillers in a post-fight piss-test. As the Sandman wrote:

“In the days leading up to my fight with Anderson Silva, I experienced some residual pain in my foot from a previous injury. I made the extremely poor choice to take some pain medications that I did not have a prescription for. I realize this was an ignorant and dangerous decision.”

Irvin, who tore his ACL and MCL during a fight with Thiago Silva at UFC 71 in May 2007, also broke his foot earlier this year while preparing for a scheduled fight against Rashad Evans, which was to go down at UFC 85. According to Sherdog, Irvin accepted the Anderson Silva fight only days after re-entering the gym following his recovery period from the foot injury. Irvin has been temporarily suspended by the NSAC pending a disciplinary hearing, and likely faces a longer suspension and a fine.

They may have reduced his steroid suspension from one year to six months because of the reasonable doubt he raised during his appeals, but in the eyes of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Sean Sherk is still a filthy steroid cheat whose urine, if ingested, would immediately cause testicle shrinkage in men and testicle growth in women. So to be extra sure that there aren’t any shenanigans come fight night, the NSAC voted yesterday that Sean Sherk would be required to undergo additional drug testing prior to UFC 84 (May 24th, Las Vegas). Sherk has agreed to submit the extra wee-wee during the week of April 21st, because apparently next week isn’t convenient for him, clean-piss-wise. Anyway, it’s surely just an insulting formality. Even if Sherk cycled in the past — and since nobody was ever able to refute his “chain of custody fuckup” argument, we’re not passing judgment on the guy — there’s no way he’d have the balls to juice up in preparation for his first fight after a suspension.

According to a report on MMAPredictions:

Sherk has already submitted all the necessary medical and administrative paperwork for his license to be approved. A commission member asked Sherk, “Mr. Sherk, do you understand that the NCAC will hold you responsible for anything that comes up positive in your test, irrespective of your knowingly taking a certain steroid?”

“Yes I understand that I am responsible for anything that goes into my body,” Sherk answered.

Unfortunately, they judge you on what comes out. Don’t worry man, you’ll get the hang of this…

(Keith Kizer can’t wait to stick it to you.)

Recently the Nevada State Athletic Commission announced that they would be conducting random drug tests. Meaning, MMA fighters can be tested at any time, regardless of whether they are scheduled to fight or not. And a missed test gets you a big “F” for fucked. While not a ton of details were provided in the initial announcement, MMA Junkie has since pulled a little more out of the executive director of the NSAC, Keith Kizer.

Although his answers started off like this – “I don’t know off the top of my head. I can’t think of anything specific….it’s hard to know all the possibilities….Ehhh. It’s hard to know in advance.” – he did answer some questions, one of which we already stated: if a fighter looks like he’s changed physically, then he’ll be tested.

Oh yeah, sure, sure. That’s possible. I don’t want to say it would be (a reason), but it could be. That’s a possible deal. I don’t want to say that would be a major reason to test a guy, but that’s a possible reason to test a guy.

Restating the point adds up to: “Yes, that will be the main reason we test a fighter.” But the good thing for fighters who – like those of you who have spent a night downtown because you were with your bud (who had some bud) when he got busted – they won’t be tested just because a fighter they train with got nailed for juicing. Although, Kizer admitted that if you were treated by the same doc or team, they might look into it. Again meaning, “yes.” But don’t misunderstand. No organization that is set up to police people and administer drug tests actually want to bust anyone. Cops don’t enjoy writing you tickets, do they?

For those of you still holding your breath since UFC 79, you can finally take that breath of cigarette smoke-filled oxygen. Not that it’s a slow news day or anything, but the Nevada State Athletic Commission has assured the world that every fighter that was tested for the December 29th PPV event was clean. By clean, they mean of any banned substances – performance enhancers and mood enhancers alike (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Yo to MMA Weekly for digging this up:

According to the commission’s executive director Keith Kizer, “The NSAC tested Georges St. Pierre, Matt Hughes, Chuck Liddell, Wanderlei Silva, Lyoto Machida, Sokoudjou, Rich Clementi, Melvin Guillard, Manny Gamburyan, Dean Lister, Jordan Radev, and Mark Bocek.”

Kizer also confirmed that all of the athletes on a privately held show at the Riviera Hotel & Casino on Jan. 8 were cleared of performance enhancing substances. “All the steroid tests are back for the Jan. 8 show and they were all negative.”

This ‘private event’ on the 8th certainly sounds too official to have been a bachelor party that turned into a fight night. They released the names of the fighters, which include: Jesse Forbes, Victor Moreno, Jacob McClintock, Chris Kennedy, Robert Scott, and Steve Steinbeiss. However, the NSAC may have blown their load a bit early as tests for the good stuff mood altering drugs are still up in the air for the fighters from the Riviera event.