Ariel Helwani sat in his freshman English class in Montreal, Canada, staring intently at his textbook. Inside was a carefully hidden copy of Sports Illustrated magazine.

“It was one of those issues where they were rating the best schools for this… best party school, best football school,” Helwani recalled. “Best sports broadcasting school was Syracuse, and I remember it like it was yesterday, Syracuse University, that’s where I’m going.”

Fast-forward to the first week of classes of the 2000 fall semester at SU. After receiving a letter notifying him of his acceptance into the Speech Communications major in SU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, Helwani knew that he was going to have to hit the books hard if he was going to transfer into the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to study broadcast journalism. With such a daunting task ahead of him, it didn’t help that Helwani, “a reserved person coming from a reserved family,” would also have trouble adjusting to his new life on a college campus.

Now, Helwani is widely considered to be today’s preeminent mixed martial arts journalist. He has been named MMA Journalist of the Year six consecutive times at the World MMA Awards and has worked as an MMA Insider for Fox Sports 1, co-hosted the Sirius XM radio show “Fight Club,” and currently hosts “The MMA Hour” podcast and “The MMA Beat.” Ariel also works as a video reporter and writer for MMAFighting.com. Tonight, Helwani will cover a new Ultimate Fighting Championship event.

The UFC will hold its first fight in New York City at Madison Square Garden. After a long legal battle lasting nearly 20 years, New York signed a bill lifting its ban on professional mixed martial arts, the last U.S. state to do so. Helwani will cover New York’s inaugural event Saturday.

Helwani discovered his passion for sports early in his childhood. From watching the New York Knicks on TV to playing on his high school basketball team and even competing at the Maccabiah Games, Helwani immersed himself in the world of sports. Although he credits his older brothers Marc and David for getting him into it, he never rooted for the popular teams they did, preferring the underdogs instead.

One day while watching pay-per-view events on his grandparents’ television Helwani came across a UFC event. It was a small mixed martial arts promotion company that was desperately trying to grow, not only its organization but the sport as well. Sharing similarities with professional wrestling, one of Ariel’s first loves, he became intrigued and slowly began following the sport of MMA.

When he was younger, Ariel dreamed of becoming a broadcaster covering the NBA. However, upon his acceptance into Newhouse he found himself surrounded by students “trying to be the next Bob Costas,” which turned him off of covering mainstream sports.

“When I got to Syracuse I didn’t want anything to do with the sports teams,” Ariel recalled.

As someone who embraced being different and going against the grain, Ariel’s WERW radio show “The Main Event” was quite fitting. A professional wrestling/mixed martial arts show, “The Main Event” had some surprisingly big guests despite the studio’s inability to make outgoing calls. Ariel had to rely on his mother and sister to call the guests and put them on a conference call with him, unbeknownst to the guest. Legends from both sports made appearances, including Bruce Buffer, Dan Severn, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, and Tommy Dreamer. 

Towards the end of his undergraduate career, Helwani decided to seek out some advice from current Director of Newhouse Sports Media Center, John Nicholson. Nicholson, advised him to first try a smaller market, that it was quite difficult to make it in New York City right off the bat. While this was the logical answer, it was not the one Helwani wanted to hear.

Helwani moved away from broadcasting and accepted an internship at HBO Sports where he worked on the documentary “Perfect Upset: The 1985 Villanova vs. Georgetown NCAA Championship.” He enjoyed the experience and decided to try his hand at working in TV production, specifically for the UFC. At the time, the UFC was being broadcast on SpikeTV. Helwani applied to work there and was hired to be a production coordinator, but after a week of logging tapes realized it wasn’t the job for him. He had been interested in creating content, but  the UFC had been creating its own content, not SpikeTV.

Helwani decided to go back to his roots in journalism. He created the website JarryPark.com and began a MMA blog where he posted audio interviews he conducted with fighters. It was slow going, and he decided to give himself a six-month deadlinew to be offered a job before he gave up and went back to television production. With three days remaining before his deadline, Helwani received an offer from Wasserman Media Group’s new website MMARated.com which he took, and “the rest is history.”

The UFC 205 in New York City contains one of the most stacked cards in the history of the UFC. The main event features a matchup between current lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez and current featherweight champion Conor “The Notorious” McGregor for the UFC Lightweight Title. If McGregor wins, he will be the first fighter in UFC history to hold two belts in two different divisions simultaneously. The co-main event also has title implications, as Tyron “The Chosen One” Woodley attempts to defend his welterweight belt for the first time against Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson.

While being front and center covering New York’s inaugural UFC event might seem like the pinnacle of his career, Helwani believes that he still has a long way to go before he embraces the title “the Howard Cosell of MMA.”

“I like to think I tell it how it is,” Ariel said. “I’ve been given this great opportunity to go out and ask these questions, if I’m scared of someone getting mad at a question then I shouldn’t be doing this job.” 

Published on November 12, 2016 at 4:35 pm