What’s the story?
According to Marc Raimondi at MMAfighting.com, former WWE play by play guy and announcer Todd Grisham is the newest member of the UFC broadcast team.
His roles with the company will include being part of the studio group and doing colour commentary for the Pay-Per-View events. A tweet from Grisham himself a few days ago broke the news before it was officially announced.
In case you didn’t know...
Grisham spent eight years with WWE in different roles. He started as the voice of Sunday Night Heat with Jonathan Coachman and would eventually host and do colour commentary and play by play jobs for other shows in WWE.
In 2008, Grisham was named the voice of the newly re-launched ECW brand along with Tazz as a colour commentator. Grisham eventually got promoted to play by play announcer of Smackdown in 2009 and teamed up with Jim Ross.
Also read: UFC News: Todd Grisham lands commentating job with UFC
He eventually left the company in 2011 to pursue new interests, which included working at ESPN and being a Sportscenter anchor for the past several years.
The reason for Grisham’s hiring was that UFC 207 was the play by play personality Mike Goldberg’s last show with the company. Although UFC claims that Grisham isn’t a replacement, he was almost certainly hired to help fill the void left by Goldberg.
The heart of the matter
One of UFC’s reasons for choosing Grisham has to be his relevance in the sports world to most fans, due to him having worked with ESPN and WWE for the past ten years.
His voice will be recognisable for fans to tune into and his knowledge and passion for the job should not be in question with most fans being familiar with his history.
What next?
Fans also won’t have to wait long to hear Grisham’s voice calling the action in the octagon as he is set to be a part of the production for UFC Fight Night: Penn vs. Rodriguez on January 15th.
Also, with this deal, Grisham is now an exclusive member of the Fox Sports 1 Team.
Sportskeeda’s Take
This is a very big hire for UFC’s play by play team and studio group. Adding someone with Grisham’s background and resumé to the UFC product can only help the company moving forward, especially after losing a voice like Goldberg’s who had been synonymous with UFC since 1997.
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