Bas Rutten responds to Kimbo

With the premier of The Ultimate Fighter 10 season coming this week, all eyes have been on Kimbo Slice. The internet sensation turned mixed martial artist will try his luck in the UFC reality series after a notorious stint with EliteXC.

He was 3-1 while fighting for Elite XC, and was being trained by one of the best around, Bas Rutten. It’s been well documented that the break-up between the two, following the 0:14 second TKO at the hands of Seth Petruzelli, had turned the once friends into now foes. Rutten had claimed that Keven “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson had stopped listening to the legendary fighter/coach and didn’t need to train using Ruttens advice. Ultimately, the two went their separate ways, but both have stayed vocal about the split.

Rutten jabbed first with his comments stating Slice had turned into an “a**hole”, and wasn’t interested in training people with no respect for his teachings.

Last week, Kimbo struck back with his own version stating, “I guess with him, he pretended to be a friend but he really wasn’t I guess. It was just business with him. You pay a guy good money to teach you things and be a good teacher and they take your money. But then they turn round and say ‘I tried to teach you stuff but its not working’ Come on man, you’re not a good teacher – so really he owes me some money right?,” Slice laughed. “But its all good, we all do what we gotta do.”

“El Guapo”, never one to keep quiet, issued a quick rebuttal to FightersOnly.com, claiming, “he had to respond to this”.

In the letter sent, Rutten wrote, “I didn’t say that he was an a**hole, I said that he TURNED into an a**hole, I actually told him this also about 5 weeks before the Petruzelli fight, I told him that I thought he turned into a a**hole, he said that he didn’t realize that and apologized, he did that two more times that day and even called me to say he didn’t knew he was doing that. Later I called him an a**hole because all of the sh** that he took for granted, I also told him that I had no respect for him in our last meeting, but why I said that? I won’t even go there”.

On the money he was being paid, Rutten claimed it wasn’t good as people might think, “Lets say that he made $100,000, I couldn’t train him two times a day so I told my buddy at my gym, Randy Khatami, who’s a great boxing coach and also teaches some basic submissions, that I would take him in the morning, and he would take him at night. Now everybody tells me that I just have to pay my friend a certain amount of money, like a “per hour” deal because it would be better “money wise” for me. But since I believe that a TEAM works together, I just pay him half of what I make. Lets do the math here, 10% of 100,000, is $10,000, that I split in half, so I make $5000 in 5 or 6 weeks. I also told him BEFORE I started training him, that he had to understand that when I had a commentary job, that I had to do that, since this was not a “money making machine for me” (try to live in CA from $5000 in 6 weeks and support a family, haha, I dare you). He and his manager Mike, who’s a great guy, told me they understood that.”

Its seems the war of words will probably continue, with filming of the new TUF series over and constant access to the fighters, but it remains to be seen if Slice wants continue with one of the most voiced people in the MMA community. Bas Rutten has never been shy about speaking his mind, and something tells me he could do this forever.

He finished his letter with this, “If Kimbo would have done everything that he did in the beginning when he came in, he had great potential. To now blame that on the people who trained him, very loser thing to do. And if it was so bad, why is he still with Randy Khatami? He trains him in the style as I do because I told him so. See what I mean? He makes no sense. Lets see what he did in the “Ultimate Fighter” with his new and improved training. To put it in his own words. “Haha, but its all good, we all do what we gotta do”.

The series premier of The Ultimate Fighter 10: The Heavyweights airs Wednesday of this week and we will get to see first hand just how improved Kimbo has become.