Ariel Helwani talks with an emotional Phil Baroni post-UFC 125

When you watch fights, you don’t always think of fighters as people. I mean, sure, we love things like two guys who just pummeled each other for 15-minutes smiling with their arms around each other, photos of Fedor grinning with a pair of ice cream cones, or any number of things outside of the actual pugilism that makes these warriors sound human and we recognize the combatants in the cage as men and women. But, it’s still easy for us keyboard fighters to write off a guy as “a bum” or “washed out” or any number of things, forgetting exactly what it takes, even to lose at such a high level of MMA.

So, this is a bit of a sobering—and sort of tough to watch—look at Phil Baroni, who, in the minds of most, is characterized by his sunglasses and over-the-top walkouts, wild brawling, and straddling the cage wall, proclaiming himself “THE BEST EVA,” talking his disappointing loss (following a solid performance up until he got dazed with a head kick) to Brad Tavares, his expectation that he’ll be released from the UFC, and the admission that he’ll keep on fighting anywhere he can anways since, “(he) can’t sing or dance, right?”