First, Bob Reilly:

 ”And the commissioner better get on the ball and do her job, as well as the rest of the commission,” Reilly said. ”So this is an illegal activity by any call, by any interpretation of the law and the commission (State Athletic Commission) has to do their job.”

Christ.

It came in this piece from WNYT, where Bill Lambdin basically presents this as a renegade show:

Apparently, whoever did the legwork for this piece doesn’t know about a thing called Google. If they did, they’d find that amateur MMA has been legal in New York all along due to a loophole, which was admitted by the Attorney General back in January.

Lambdin, who delivers the story on-air, presents it as if Shannon Miller and Five Guys Fighting are simply ASSUMING it’s legal. Not true, and any basic work done on this would reveal that wasn’t the case. And yet there’s no mention from the reporter in this piece that amateur MMA was specifically cited as being legal back in January in that aforementioned motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against New York to get MMA legalized:

The statute’s provision on its face explicitly speaks to ‘professional’ combative sports and does not address amateur sports. Moreover, while the legislature, in another statute, regulates amateur boxing and wrestling, the legislature has not enacted a provision expressly addressing any amateur martial arts activity. Accordingly, the statute does not treat amateur MMA bouts any differently from amateur bouts involving traditional martial arts.

Guys, c’mon. There are slow-witted gits on blogspot who can barely string a sentence together that do a more comprehensive job than this.

As for Bob Reilly, I continue to be astonished that a guy can be that passionate about something while maintaining that level of ignorance and outright stupidity on the subject. To say he comes across as an uninformed petulant child with his whining and demand that the Athletic Commission do its job (which they will; they’ll be at the damn thing, Bob) would be unfairly dismissive of the capability of children to exercise reason.

Pretty alarming considering his position.

Previously: Cage Wars 13: area’s first sanctioned MMA event on August 11th