Last weekend I was hanging out with my best buds Will & Ben watching some good ol’ UFC at the bar. While waiting around for the UCF 123 to kick off the topic of pre-UFC fighting came up. I’m definitely all caught up on my facts about modern day mixed martial arts, but I had only seen a couple of clips of the old school Japanese leagues. This is when Ben spoke two golden words: Bas Rutten.
He’s a Deutch Thai Boxing champion from the Pancrase league that was way before my time. You have to check out this Best of Bas youtube clip:
My initial reaction was that this stuff was as fake as WWF but after some heavy Wikipedia-ing I found out that it’s the real deal. The best sentence in the article has to be:
“During his MMA career he became known for two particular things: his fondness of liver shots and his habit of doing a jumping split after winning a fight."
Oh man, I’m so inspired to get another Haymaker epic t-shirt going…
