Your favorite Twitter account’s favorite Twitter account: Who is MacMally?
One of the biggest aspects of life over the past 30 years, if not the biggest, has been the major and rapid evolution of technology. Along with that has come the world that we know and live in today. A world that sees everyone owning a cell phone and social media accounts almost as such common of necessities as it is to need to breathe to survive. But if you’re cool enough, you’ll have a sweet beard, a funny dog, know how to cook up some killer eats, and fancy yourself some face-punching. If that’s the case, you would actually be MacMally.
MMA provides us with a whole lot of incredibly unique and wild characters as is. But when we step out of the fighter distinction and look at the rambunctious community, they’re unlike anyone else. One of the more popular of them all is the man himself, Twitter’s resident MMA funnyman, the dude from Albuquerque.
As a man full of stories to tell, the first to know is that of how the MacMally name came to be. As it’s now his social media handle on everything. For Twitter, it was originally his full birth name. That was until the good ol’ internet provided him with a stalker, coincidentally also from Albuquerque, who was into MMA and began copying and posting all of his tweets like they were his own.
Eventually, this developed into some weird dox attempts of sorts and shortly after, the questionable “fan” and wannabe journalist disappeared from the platform altogether. But the name’s origin goes back before that, so all the credit can’t be given to your typical internet weirdo.
“The MacMally thing comes from … I was invited to play on the varsity baseball team,” MacMally told MyMMANews, “My older brother was on the team and his friends had heard about me and shit. And so they started calling me ‘Shane O’MacMally.’ I don’t know why but that just stuck. So, MacMally.
“I challenged [the stalker] to a boxing match. I didn’t get all upset about him copy and pasting my tweets, I just thought that’s f*cking lame. Everyone knew they were from me. But I called him out formally for a boxing, kickboxing, or MMA match and then he blocked me and started doing all that weird stalking shit. So he’s gone from Twitter now.”
He might not be as rich as “Shane O’Mac” Shane McMahon who his nickname originally was based on along with one of his names being Shane, but he’s just as entertaining.
When the New Mexico native in MacMally isn’t busy keeping up on his weekly dosage of violence or making people laugh on Twitter, he’s putting in work for a technical company. Related to an engineering genius in his uncle who started the company, when a helping hand was needed for a specific position, Mac came in to save the day.
Performing clerical work, if you want to call it that, MacMally works remotely from home for the most part. However, his duties will include getting to travel all over the US where he goes to certain worksites and makes sure everything is all good and safe. This means taking pictures of every single securement and signing off on the safety of sites where large units of steel beams, oversized loads, and things alike are transported from. You know …. federal government stuff.
Despite all that, he’s been doing more beef jerky selling these days because if you follow him at all, then you already know that Mac can make a meal any stoner would die for.
Most impressively, he’s self-taught when it comes to the art of food craft. Don’t be mistaken though, no boring cooking shows helped develop the MacMally school of kickass meal making.
“When I got to be about 15, I found myself cooking for me and my brothers a lot of the times because my parents worked so much,” he shared, “And I would just make random easy, easy stuff. I got pretty good at making some Asian food. Like I had General Tsao’s chicken I’d whip up from scratch, orange chicken, stuff like that. So then I’d be going to house parties in high school and everywhere I’d show up; ‘Ahh dude make some f*ckin’ orange chicken!’ It all just kinda started like that.
“Then I would cook for when I had girls over and cook dinner and whatnot. Then when it really, really started getting crazy, and I was experimenting was when I got a house and then I was probably like 22. And every fight night, I’d have all the boys over. All of them knew, ‘Head over to f*ckin’ Mac’s house. Let’s f*ckin’ eat and watch the fights,’ So every morning on Saturday, I would get a bunch of ribs or pork butt, stuff like that. I’d rip those up during the fights and cover the table with f*cking aluminum foil and we all just ate like vikings during the main event. But everything I’ve learned about cooking was just trial and error. And internet recipes, I guess.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8KS6cOJJNv/
Your favorite Twitter account’s favorite Twitter account, MacMally is a hardcore MMA fan. If he wasn’t, we likely wouldn’t know about him. But just by being himself, he’s created a massive following of 25,200-plus and rapidly counting. Just for a comparison, that’s more than 90 percent of MMA media outlets’ accounts and only roughly 9,000 less than UFC featherweight champion Alex Volkanovski. In general, that’s a lot more than most of your average fighters.
So how did it all come to be in MMA for the beer-chugging dog whisperer? Well, he would go to his grandfather’s every Summer when he was younger to work with horses and spend time together in Farmington.
“As a kid, my grandpa and I would watch – I think it was UFC on Fuel back in the day,” recalled MacMally, “He’d watch fights and I’d watch them and they were just fascinating to me. My first favorite fighter was Evan Tanner because that was his favorite fighter. He liked Evan Tanner and Forrest Griffin. So naturally, Evan Tanner became my favorite and I wouldn’t have called myself a hardcore fan or anything back then, I just liked watching them with my grandpa. And then we didn’t have internet yet so I couldn’t get on Fight Pass and really dive in. So it was just whenever it was on I was watching it.”
He might not have been a hardcore fan back then, but in 2020 he sure is.
Never missing a card from Invicta FC, Bellator, RIZIN, UFC, and LFA, Mac catches it all. Well, except for ONE Championship due to their less American friendly schedule. Unless it’s a card featuring the likes of Demetrious Johnson, Eddie Alvarez, or Sage Northcutt. So when it comes to ONE, he’s still very much a casual.
As someone begins to find a deeper appreciation for something, it tends to lead to wanting to converse about it with others. Something that the internet and social media’s development has been crucial in – providing that interaction we may not be able to find as easily in everyday life. MMA is still an incredibly young sport and considered not for the faint of heart despite its continued growth.
For MacMally, he was in the group of isolated New Mexico MMA fans.
“I literally got a Twitter because … basically the only reason I started Twitter … for whatever reason, it seems like Twitter’s popular in a lot of areas but in New Mexico, no one seems to have a f*cking Twitter,” MacMally explained. “There’s zero Twitter presence. No one really knows what it is besides ‘Oh, that shit Donald Trump tweets from?’ So when I’d watch the fights all the time with my boys, we’d have a cookout, whatever. You’d always notice that ‘Oh, breaking news, so and so just tweeted on Twitter…’ So breaking news from Twitter, you know, or, ‘Oh, this fighter announced on Twitter the other day that such and such.’ Or you’re watching an Invicta card and they go ‘Follow us on Twitter and we’ll get your questions here.’ Then they read off your question. So I started a Twitter account for no other reason than to just follow fight news. And then, Caposa was one of the first dudes I found on here and I was like, ‘Holy shit, look how much MMA I’m missing.’ This dude, he’s always tweeting about all these different fights, posting clips. So that’s when it really kicked into a higher degree.
“I started picking up on the way dudes like Izi [Garcia] would tweet and I was like, ‘Oh my god, dude some of this sh*t’s f*cking hilarious.’ And it pertains to the subject I want to talk about anyway. I’ve always thought to myself, I’m pretty funny, I guess. So I’ve always had funny shit to say. I started making my own jokes and here we are now.”
In today’s world of social statuses and things alike, the concept of gaining popularity on a large scale just for being yourself is a wild concept to many. But that’s exactly the recipe to MacMally’s rise to Twitter fame.
Because of that, many may get an inflated ego. When considering he is only on the site for the sole purpose of interaction and thought sharing, one might imagine it being even harder for him not to get a bit full of himself. It just goes to show that you can’t beat being genuine.
“I was telling someone the other day that I actually prefer – I’m glad everyone follows me, I’m glad I can share my jokes with so many people … so I’m not complaining,” MacMally began, “But I enjoyed Twitter more, I’d say when I just had a couple thousand followers, and I could interact and talk with everyone. But it’s just so many people now that it’s hard to keep up and I feel bad. Because dudes like you, we used to talk all the time. And I just have so many people trying to talk to me now. It’s just hard to keep up with everyone.
“I like to respond to everyone because I feel like a dick if I don’t like your comment when you interact with me or if you comment on my post, I don’t want to just ignore you or make you feel like I’m like, ‘Ooh.’ So I try to respond to everyone. That’s why it’s just become – there’s so many people. It’s wild.
“I don’t think I’m special. I like to make other people feel like they’re involved in the conversation too. And it’s just hard to keep up now.”
Yes, it’s true. As alluded to, Mac has been big-leaguing me ever since he took off going from his early 4,000 followers to his current number. All while I remain far behind in the dust.
In all seriousness, my first interactions with MacMally came through the now-defunct MMA outlet known as MMA Today. A site that has produced and or worked alongside some of the current landscape’s greatest MMA media members. Names such as John Hyon Ko of Kumite TV, Michael Fiedel of The Body Lock, and the MMA Junkie duo that is Nolan King and Farah Hannoun.
During our time writing together at the site, MacMally had his own article series known as “MacMally’s R-Rated MMA Rants” and they were unlike pretty much anything else you can read in the MMA media sphere. It was just one of the many things that brought MMA Today together during its run.
Since then, he hasn’t written any more installments into the series or any articles at all for that matter. But it has, of course, crossed his mind.
“I’d say I definitely thought about reviving the MacMally’s R-rated MMA rants,” he said, “And that’s about as far as I’ve thought about [writing]. Because I enjoyed doing that. I don’t really know why I stopped. I mean, I didn’t love it. I just thought it was kind of fun to talk about MMA, but then I realized, I can just talk about MMA on the TL (timeline). Then MMA Today kind of fell out and I just, I haven’t really done anything. But there has been a couple companies or websites or whatever you want to call them that have hit me up asking if I would write for them.
“I saw the way people like you and Nolan started putting in work and doing real good, and kind of in my opinion, kind of blowing up as far as MMA media, starting off in MMA media’s game goes and I just knew like, bro, these guys work their asses off and for me, it’s more just like a fun ‘I’ll just do it when I feel like it’ thing and I probably never put the same effort into it.”
With great power or popularity comes great responsibility! Well, maybe … Perhaps it’s all a matter of perception.
In MacMally’s case, reaching certain heights of Twitter fame, or just fame in general for that matter, it can often all be unexpected. As surely it is the case for most who are just doing something they enjoy.
If Mac decided to one day up and bail on the MMA community, it would take quite a toll on everyone that enjoys scrolling through their timeline for a daily dosage of comedic MMA takes and what have you. He doesn’t necessarily feel like there’s a certain commitment, pressure, or obligation at this point to continue doing what he does within the Twittersphere. But he just likes to lighten things up a bit if possible.
And because of the attention gained, it’s attracted a lot more than just fellow fans of our beloved sport. Some of the names you may even think he’s straight-up lying about.
“I feel some days will be … when everyone’s fighting about sh*t, I tend to kind of sit back and go, ‘I gotta come up with a joke and make some people laugh,'” MacMally expressed, “Get our topic off all this bullsh*t. I don’t know. So sometimes I do feel somewhat under pressure to make a joke. But, you know, I guess it’s the same thing as if – I just see jokes hanging out there sometimes I’m like, ‘Someone’s got to take a swing at that.’ And that’s me.
“Yeah, there’s quite a few [fighters who have interacted with me]. It’s pretty crazy. I mean, it’s crazy to me that John Wayne Parr interacts with me on Twitter. He’s a combat sports legend. Ike Vallie-Flagg. I always enjoy interacting with him. He’s from New Mexico so … Well, I don’t know if he’s from here, but you know, he’s a New Mexico resident. He’s tried and true 505. But Chas Skelly’s hit me up for beef jerky and that reminds me, I gotta get to him pretty quick. Elias Theodorou, talking with him, he’s real cool. He’s a real cool dude. And then, of course, nothing will ever top when Gina Carano hit me up for a rib recipe. I don’t really care what happens on Twitter, I don’t know what happens on Twitter, but nothing will ever top that.”
Yes, that is correct. The Gina Carano.
The same Gina Carano that essentially put female MMA fighters on the map in the late 2000s and the same Gina Carano who is now one hell of an actress and movie star. Presumably, it’s not just every day that really anyone in the current MMA community, outside of fighters, gets to interact with Carano. Hell, it took Ariel Helwani about 10 years or so to get her back on his show.
Little did he know, he should have just been refining his cooking skills during that whole decade.
“Yeah, she did [use the recipe] the next day and she posted a video of it on Twitter and even tagged me in it,” MacMally said, “She goes, ‘Shoutout to MacMally,’ and I think it was her uncle she said that was going to that cookout or had just given her more pointers too. Because I guess, in the DMs she had told me her uncle was like a professional chef and everything I had told her as far as pointers and whatnot were dead on and the same thing he said. So she shouted me and him out on her Instagram. That was pretty cool.”
First time cooking ribs.. was tricky but we got them to a good place. 👏👏 but I still want to go watch a pro work their magic 💯🙏💯@MacMallyMMA thank you for the recipe!! Everyone loved it. ♥️ pic.twitter.com/PC774U92so
— Gina Carano 🕯 (@ginacarano) June 23, 2019
For all the ridiculousness that Twitter has added to MacMally’s life, nothing may compare to his video gaming.
Pretty much a championship-caliber gamer when it comes to the EA Sports UFC games, MacMally has welcomed all challengers from the Twitter world. In doing so, he says that out of hundreds of online foes, only three have beaten him best two out of three. Most suffer the ill-fated MacMally sleeper special. A maneuver that can often be found posted on his feed.
Unfortunately, some take it more seriously than others which has led to trash-talking from some players and resulted in “point-fighting” tactics. Everyone just wants to “decrown” the Mac at this point in a full-length contest. Something that the New Mexico native couldn’t be any less interested in. “I’m not trying to fight for a full Family Guy episode,” he said with a laugh.
Oh, you know what? Retract that previous statement about MacMally’s gaming stories being his most ridiculous revolving around his Twitter account.
As a very loving and happy dog owner, Mac is always posting funny pictures of him and his husky pups. One of which goes by the name of Gokhan … like UFC light heavyweight and legendary kickboxer, Gokhan Saki.
Well, MacMally isn’t the only one who loves his little fuzzy beast as Gokhan’s popularity became something in of itself, too. So much so that someone ended up creating a Twitter account pretending to be MacMally’s dog.
2803 followers and over 14 months later, Mac still has no idea who exactly is running his own pet’s social media. And by now, he imagines the person would want to take credit for such a hilarious feat. But hey, can’t knock their commitment to the character and secrecy of it all.
Folks, the internet is truly something else.
“There’s a lot of people, especially that have followed me recently, that think that it’s just me talking to myself,” MacMally explained, “I don’t know who started that account and it can be drawn back to – I remember the first time he popped up. Me and some dudes were talking on Twitter about PS4 or Xbox. And I said, ‘I have an Xbox, PS4, and PC.’ And then I just see Gokhan’s f*cking picture pop up and him say, ‘You’re embarrassing me nerd,’ or something like that. And I was like what the f*ck?! I thought it was maybe my girlfriend. No, it ended up – it’s just some dude that had been following me and he likes Gokhan and it’s just worked so well. I don’t think I’d be interested in it anymore if I was doing it with myself.
“I would have lost interest a long time ago. But because I can’t put a face on [who it is]. Like if I knew it was my girlfriend. I would have lost interest too by now because it’d be like, I see a tweet from Gokhan and I’d be all, ‘Oh, shut up.’ You know what I mean? But because I don’t know who it is it’s almost as if Gokhan is f*cking tweeting me. So it’s hilarious to me. And so I send him the pictures, we chat all the time but we just don’t go into the personal stuff cause it’s just kind of Twitter’s best-kept secret.
“I send him all those pictures to use and he has a folder in his phone,” he continued, “I guess he keeps all the Gokhan pictures [there]. It’s funny, his girlfriend didn’t know he did that. And for the longest time he hid it from her because he was like, ‘Dude today she opened my phone and found a folder Gokhan pics and was like who the f*ck is this dog?’ He’s all, ‘Oh, just a dog I like on Twitter.’ And he kind of left it at that because he thought she would think it was weird he was running a dog’s account. Then I told him to just tell her, she’d probably think it’s hilarious. Eventually, after a long time, he finally did tell her and she thought it was hilarious.”
Morning bro, that bowl over there isn’t gonna fill itself. Up you son of a bitch! pic.twitter.com/F2Wo8fREkh
— gokhan (@gokhandagawd) March 9, 2020
If the overall story of the man known as MacMally tells us one thing, it’s that you need to be able to grow facial hair, cook well, and have funny dogs to be of importance in this digital world we now live in.
No, no, of course, that’s not the main takeaway. It’s that if you choose to utilize today’s outlets to their ultimate capacity, it’s very possible to gain some traction all just by being yourself. There’s a lot of people on Earth … and we can’t all be MacMallys but that doesn’t mean a crowd isn’t there to be attracted.
In the end, even though it’s something he could live without, Twitter’s resident MMA funnyman admits that having his account has made his life less boring.
“I was never huge on social media,” MacMally said, “I mean interest-wise, I just love having an outlet where I can make jokes pertaining to a subject I want to talk about, that people can understand. Because if I walk up to one of my friends in real life and tell them one of my fucking MMA jokes they’re more than likely not going to get it. So it’s just it’s really cool that I found an outlet that I can make jokes about a subject a bunch of people are tuned into on that specific site so I really love doing that. Because before, as I said, I’d come up with something funny as shit while I’m watching the fights and you tell your boy, and he’s like, ‘I don’t get it. I don’t know Gabi Garcia is,’ or whatever the fuck. Jesus Christ, that was a good joke. So it’s just great. That’s why I love Twitter. I can’t think of a more concentrated area of MMA fans that I can be engaged with.”
