Joe Rogan’s UFC partner expresses desire for role | Sports News

Jon Anik has spent a decade because the UFC’s lead play-by-play voice, turning into one of essentially the most recognizable sounds in fight sports activities alongside Joe Rogan and Daniel Cormier. 

He has referred to as title fights, historic knockouts and defining UFC moments for the promotion. By most measures, he has the job broadcasters dream of.

Yet Anik, who as soon as admitted he was contemplating quitting the game resulting from fan abuse, has been more and more open about one other ambition that predates his MMA success — calling soccer.

That desire surfaced again this week when Anik appeared on ‘The Zach Gelb Show,’ the place he spoke candidly about a pull he says has by no means left him.

While he stays absolutely dedicated to his role with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Anik acknowledged that soccer was the unique dream that drew him into broadcasting.

“American football has always been the dream for me,” Anik mentioned. “I don’t know that I’d ever be able to fully get the NFL dream out of my system.”

“I have the job that I want right now, but I would be telling a bald-faced lie if I said I didn’t feel that tug to call an NFL football game, or call an NFL season before it’s all said and done.”

Anik’s connection to soccer goes back to his childhood in Massachusetts, long earlier than he ever stepped into an MMA sales space. He grew up attending New England Patriots video games within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, years earlier than the franchise grew to become a dynasty, and mentioned the game grew to become ingrained in his identification at an early age.

“Growing up with the NFL sort of being the fabric of my family and going to New England Patriots games in the 1980s and ’90s when they were the laughing stock of the NFL, and now seeing where the league is, football’s in my DNA,” Anik mentioned. “Just like fighting’s in all of our DNA.”

While his profession path finally led him to fight sports activities, Anik has not been fully absent from soccer broadcasts.

In 2015, a number of years after leaving ESPN to tackle his present UFC role, he returned to the sales space to call a school soccer sport between Arizona and Washington. The expertise, he admitted, got here with nerves after years away from the game.

“The last time I called a college football game was 2015, it was Arizona at Washington,” Anik defined. “And thankfully for me, because I hadn’t called a college football game since I’d been at ESPN in 2011, it was 49–3. Because going in, I was thinking, ‘Man, if this game’s close, I’m really gonna be challenged.’”

Anik additionally acknowledged that soccer presents a vastly totally different workload and rhythm in comparison with the UFC schedule, which options long, single-day dwell occasions somewhat than week-to-week preparation.

“That would be fun, and I would absolutely welcome that challenge,” he mentioned. “Even though our UFC schedule is pretty intensive and no live event is as long as ours, that would be an interesting challenge going 12 straight weeks because that’s not my reality right now, and that has its own set of challenges.”