Breen talks BE and ‘the last bastion of MMA editorial writing’

Jordan Breen. Photo: Sherdog

Jordan Breen wants to infuse the modern landscape of MMA with elements of what made him fall in love with the sport.

Jordan Breen works to inject the modern landscape of MMA with elements from its golden age.

Breen has an important stamp on the history of MMA, from his work with Sherdog to his time commentating for Strikeforce. As an editorial writer with Bloody Elbow, Breen brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport and eclectic personality. Breen’s involvement with this publication came at an important intersection of his life. Breen compared it to Ingres’s Violin.

“Ingres was a moderately successful French composer, I believe, in the 18th century. By all means, he was a decent composer [but] he never made money being a composer. In his off time he started doing watercolor art. For years, no one knew he did watercolor art,” Breen said on the penultimate episode of The Insiders Season 1. “The idea of Ingres’s Violin is the idea that maybe the thing that you are best at isn’t the thing that you’re most accomplished for. I took that to heart.”

“I tried to figure out, ‘What’s my violin?’ Is the MMA media what I’m just designed to do? In a way, I thought it was silly because, I like to think I’m not your average bear, like Yogi. I fell into this because it was a passion,” Breen continued. “I wasn’t groomed from day one to be an MMA journalist or writer or anything like that. I got an opportunity when I was a teenager, which was a dream come true, and I dedicated the next decade-plus to it.”

The longtime mixed martial arts enthusiast has experienced just about every facet of MMA media at different levels.

“I’d like to think I’m a Jack of all trades, but I think I found what people respond to the most and what gets the bills paid. It is editorial writing,” he said. “Doing editorial writing, there is always the question of, ‘Is there going to be a squeeze on you?’ Do we have financial backers that are also in bed with UFC or Bellator. You can’t say this and you can’t say that. That is something I always loved about Bloody Elbow. For me, Bloody Elbow is the only remaining blog. That sounds like a diss to a lot of people, especially in a journalistic sense, but I mean it in the best way possible.”

“I know for a fact that almost every person who makes a decision in this sport, whether it’s someone from UFC, Bellator, ONE Championship, Rizin, people who work for athletic commissions, they read Bloody Elbow every day. Every f—king day,” Breen asserted. “I don’t think it’s the only source of good editorial writing, but it feels for me like the last bastion of MMA editorial writing where people can just be honest. People can argue in the comments and whatever, but those commenters are always the people who come back and read every day. To me, that feels like what I grew up with and that’s the ideation of what I still want the sport to be. What makes it the most enjoyable for me.”