Bas Rutten: “I have zero respect for Kimbo”

As Kimbo Slice attempts to rekindle his guttered career on the Ultimate Fighter, he’ll have to do it without the support of his former coach and all around crazy person Bas Rutten. Back when Slice was the untested star of the EliteXC promotion, Bas was one of the few legitimate and respected mixed martial artists who were talking him up, calling him a talented newcomer who’d do big things if he kept working hard.

Bas Rutten

Unfortunately, Bas Rutten claims that around the time of the Ken Shamrock fight, Kimbo stopped listening to him and actually started to get worse. Here’s what he told Fighters Only magazine about the situation and why he will never train Kimbo again:

“I misjudged him, he turned into a whole different person. I told him a few weeks ago, I had a sit down with him. I told him that he was an asshole and that I have zero respect (for him] and I cant train people that I have no respect for. Can’t ever,” Rutten told Fighters Only in a recent interview.

“He just turned into a different guy, he didn’t need to do the things that I told him to do. He wasn’t going to go to the ground, you know? The day before the [Petruzelli] fight, I told him I wanted to go over heel hooks and escapes, and he said “Nah, its not going to go to the ground”.

I said ‘Ha, I like that attitude – but what if it does go to the ground?’ but he said ‘Its not going to go’. So I said OK, but don’t let me tell you ‘I told you so’ if he snaps your fuckin’ leg in half. He said ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing for you to be telling me mentally, before a fight’! I said ‘I don’t think its a good thing for you not to be doing what I tell you, before the fight”!

Bas Rutten is not someone you want to disagree with. A pioneer of the sport who used to fight in Japan alongside Ken Shamrock in the early 90’s, he became an internet celebrity due to his amusingly violent bar fighting instructional dvds, and was featured in the video game Grand Theft Auto 4. While he’s one of the most entertaining jokers in the industry, his training chops are solid and Kimbo Slice has an even tougher hill to climb now that Bas has excommunicated him from his circle.