The Voice Box: So You Wanna Be an MMA Commentator?

MMA announcer Michael "The Voice" Schiavello of HDNet Fights checks in with ProFighting-fans.com

I received an email recently from an aspiring young commentator asking for advice on how to break into broadcasting and what attributes make a successful fight announcer. As I contemplated his question my fingers began dancing over my keyboard as I rattled off the most important nuggets of guidance I’d garnered as a fight commentator for the last 15 years. My response went something like this:

To become a television broadcaster is a rewarding job but certainly not an easy one. It requires a good command of the English language; a confidence with your voice and the ability to intonate, project and “deliver” your voice to capture the mood of the event you are commentating. You need to be thoroughly researched for every event you cover. You also need to understand the basics of television production for the timing of voice overs, throws to breaks, sponsorship shills and…

I stopped typing. What I’d written was complete and utter drivel that may as well have been cut and pasted from a tacky text book written by someone who – as most tacky text books are – has never actually experienced what it’s like to commentate a live television event.

Michael Schiavello with Joe Rogan

I pressed delete, took a deep breath and wrote a single sentence of advice containing my true secret to becoming a successful fight announcer.

LOVE the work as a fan and the fans will love your work.

It may seem an overly simple fragment of counsel with little usefulness, but within this nugget of advice is the means for an aspiring fight announcer to shape himself into an exciting and entertaining broadcaster. To hone and polish his craft (remember, a work of art is NEVER finished, it is only ever abandoned) and become the type of announcer who does justice to the sport, the network and most importantly the viewers.

To become this person you must be a fan. I’m a massive fan of the sports I commentate. In fact I love all fight sports. Two men trying to outsmart each other in a human game of Battleship while punching, kicking and choking the living daylights out of each other – I love that! If I weren’t in the commentating caper, you’d still find me yelling and screaming in front of the television and running the gauntlet of emotion that only the likes of Minowaman heel-hooking Choi, Hari head kicking Overeem or Brock pounding on Mir can invoke.

The moment a sports announcer stops being a fan is the moment he loses the emotional bond with his audience. It would be a like trying to fly one of those dragons from Avatar without plugging in your tail. Lose that emotional connection and you become just another (and there’s many of them) run-of-the-mill commentator phoning in a broadcast and collecting a paycheck.

Of course it’s not easy to remain a fan given impartiality, objectivity and all the other so-called “commandments” of professional sports coverage. In fact with most sports reporters and broadcasters, the first thing to disappear is their being a fan. I’ve seen it working on magazines, radio, newspapers and television, and witnessed it at the ground roots level while studying journalism at university (of which I lasted only two months because it killed my creativity). I saw energetic and passionate journalism students quickly turn into clones and drones as the lessons in remaining objective and providing the “Who” “What” “Where” and “When” skeletal facts of a story overrode their ability to simply enjoy the topics they were covering and the act of writing itself.

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Mike Littwin of The Baltimore Sun once wrote in his award-winning 1992 feature “A Fan Again After All These Years”: Do you want to know the weirdest thing about being a sportswriter other than, of course, the requirement that you spend much of your time talking to naked men? The other weird thing is that you don't get to be a fan. The difference between sports and ballet is that in sports you root for somebody. Nobody yells at one of the ballerinas to "break a bleepin' leg, ya bum."

While professional boundaries must be respected, so too should your God-given supplies of adrenaline and the central nervous system He made for it to coarse through. Find that fine and beautiful line between professionalism and being a fan, and you’ve found Nirvana.

My colleague and friend Joe Rogan, who is my favorite fight commentator, has said in a number of interviews that he is a “professional fan”. He gets paid to cover and talk about a sport he loves. He once told Michael David Smith: “I’ll always be a fan of mixed martial arts, but I don’t have to work in it to be a fan.” Like myself Rogan is a fan of all good fight sports no matter what the code or organization. He’s contracted to UFC but he tunes into DREAM and K-1 (among others) on HDNet. It is his passion as a fan, combined with expert knowledge that makes him such an entertaining and respected commentator (who I am thrilled to have placed second to, by the way, in both the Bloody Elbow and the Underground “2009 Commentator of the Year” Awards).

Passion and knowledge work hand-in-hand and this brings me back to my original piece of advice. If you are passionate about something in life, you’re going to want to consume as much knowledge about it as possible. You don’t need a framed diploma hanging on a wall to be a fight sports commentator. You need passion. With passion comes the thirst for knowledge. That thirst for knowledge becomes an obsession. And as Bruce Springsteen once said: the key to being a successful artist is to make your obsession your audience’s obsession.

By Michael Schiavello
ProFighting-fans.com MMA Guest Writer

Michael Schiavello is the voice of MMA and K-1 on HDNet and a regular correspondent for InsideMMA. He commentated the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and The Contender Asia reality TV series. He can be found online at: www.thevoiceofficial.com and at Twitter "SchiavelloVOICE."

Photo courtesy of Michael Schiavello