Meryl Streep
The Golden Globes seems an unlikely place for the sport of MMA to come under-fire, but star of the silver screen Meryl Streep used her speech after winning an award in 2017 to take a verbal jab at the sport.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and Mixed Martial Arts, which are not the arts,” Streep haughtily declared.
It was a curiously ill-informed statement for such a respected actress to make given that MMA has always been a sport that welcomes and supports outsiders and foreigners and she rightly received a considerable backlash from the MMA community as a result.
Dana White was blunt in his response, telling TMZ that Streep was “stupid” and “uneducated,” while Josh Barnett had a more reasoned response.
“While it may not have the civil, often upper class air to it that your art does, it is not devoid of talent, skill, training or schooling,” Barnett wrote.
“It was around long before what you may consider ‘the arts’ to be, and would remain even if those arts were [to] disappear. Stay classy.”
