“Big” John McCarthy likes referee Dan Miragliotta, but he feels his emotions sometimes get the best of him.
Miragliotta was the official for Michael Page’s last Bellator outing against Richard Kiely. There was some bad blood between Page and Kiely going into the fight. Page is known for his showboating during fights, but it drew the ire of Miragliotta. The referee took a point away from Page after he was posing as if he was taking a selfie. Page ended up finishing Kiely with a flying knee, but “MVP” was none too pleased with Miragliotta’s hands-on officiating.
‘Big’ John Criticizes Dan Miragliotta
Miragliotta admitted that he told someone in Page’s corner that “MVP” is a “f*cking piece of sh*t” after the fight. Speaking to MMAFighting.com, former referee and current Bellator color commentator McCarthy weighed in on the matter.
“It’s a matter of the more that you have dealt with something and you thought about it and then you go, okay, this is what you do, now you know exactly what to do before something ever happens,” McCarthy said. “Dan’s an emotional guy, and Dan’s a great guy. He’s as nice a human being as you will find, he’s a great official, he’s a great friend, I love him, but he gets emotional when he doesn’t like what someone does. Dan believes in the martial arts. Dan believes that you have respect for your opponent. That’s the way Dan’s brain works.
“When you do something that’s outside of his view of what the martial arts is, you can see that he gets affected by it. He’ll shake his head and he’ll do things and you’ll go, ‘Dan, stop that!’ He can’t, it’s just who he is. You can tell him stop and he goes, ‘I know, I know, I know,’ but then as soon as it happens again he’ll do the same thing. It’s something that he has to work on too, you have to be impartial, it doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do.”
