Bas: CM Punk needs to go to Holland

Bas Rutten recently appeared in Submission Radio to talk about life, surgery, CM Punk, Rousimar Palhares. fellow Dutchman Alistair Overeem, the UFC lawsuit, and more.

Bas likes the idea of CM Punk in the UFC.

Yeah I truly believe it’s a great thing,” said Rutten. “And you know he comes in with absolutely nothing. I mean he’s not saying ‘oh I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ He’s saying ‘listen I’m 36 years old. You know I always would love to do this, my time card is going to punch out at a certain age and I cannot do it anymore. Why not go to the UFC and see if I can do it now?’ And Dana’s going to be good. He’s not going to right away feed him like the Champion or something, you know? Give him a normal fight and see what he can do.

“And this guy with his with all his dedication – because people can talk about WWE what they want. I mean these guys work. They work so hard. They do 220 shows a year if not more, and that’s just shows. That’s not even without the traveling. So these guys are on the road the whole time, they have to do the shows. He’s already over, he knows how to deal with the audience, you know. The other guy that kind of comes to mind to me – and don’t hold me to it, I’m not going to say he’s a Sakuraba – but Sakuraba also was a pro wrestler who already worked, had a great ground game. But I think once you’re used to that audience and to do things under pressure, it’s a great way to come in.

“And if he already has a good ground game; and he said ‘Listen I’m still a white belt. I haven’t got my blue belt because I’m so inconsistent with my training’ because he trains in Florida, I believe with Rener Gracie. And he says ‘I’m almost never there,’ but he trains also where he lives, with all his friends, and he evolves a lot. So his ground game, I truly believe he has a solid ground game. You know the mind set is there.

“Once a guy like that goes to train with all the pressure that he has, that will only help him in training. And then and the pressure in fighting, I don’t know if that’s going to get to him, because he’s used to performing under pressure. It’s like stand up comedians. Most of the time these guys are great actors as well, because they’re used to performing under pressure with the live audience. That’s got to be the most nerve wracking thing there is. So then when you do it in the movie, well it’s kinda easy, and I think he’s going to have that too.

“Only his striking, that’s what everybody of course now is thinking about. How is his striking, and can he stand with somebody? Are they going to give him a great wrestler who’s also a great striker? That would be a problem maybe. Or if they say ‘no let’s just get an even guy, also a guy who’s great on the ground and see what happens.’ I see it as a great thing, great for Mixed Martial Arts because you have more eyeballs coming from WWE fans. They’re going to tune in now; they’re going to see it as well. So what’s not to like?

“You know with me, I didn’t get the ground game in the beginning, and then a really stupid thing made me suddenly understand the ground game. Like when they told me oh if I block your right leg and your right arm, I can push you to that side because you cannot base out.’ It was literally something stupid like that. And I was literally looking at the guy and I go ‘oooh my God, I never saw that?’ And I think since then – and that was a long time ago – I maybe tapped three times in the rest of my life. I never lost a fight anymore. Like, everything came together from that stupid little thing.

“So sometimes that happens with striking as well, and he should go just basic striking; cross, hook, cross, hook, cross, inside, outside low kicks maybe after punching, not just kicking. Always set it up I say. You know, and the clinch, make sure you have a great clinch. And once you start fighting like that and you know really well how to throw a cross-hook the correct way, and hit it hard and solid, and you aim for the shots. Then of course liver shots is not that big of a stretch, or a right straight to the body and a left kick to the head. It’s all the same movements, you’re only changing to high step. So from a simple cross-hook-cross, or a cross-hook, you can make eight combinations. And if you do that and keep it basic, he’s not going to be taken down probably because it’s basic; and you know after your short combination you might have to defend a take down. So that’s possible.

The trick is to do it a lot, to go spar with good guys. And I really hope he finds a great camp. I already said, if he wants to jump in my classes some time to give him the basic stuff and to see, you know I work on that, please be my guest. Because I would love to do a thing like that; same as what I did with Kimbo Slice. But really, if I have to give him some advice, I say go to Holland. Forget America right now, go to Holland. Go to a gym like a Maeng Ho gym [with] really great strikers there, and start training with those guys.

“These guys are so good that they won’t beat you up in training. Because if you have a guy a little bit less technical, they will hit you by accident, they’ll knock you out by accident, they’ll hurt you by accident. Guys like that in Holland, it’s what they do. It’s one of their main sports in Holland; kickboxing, Thai boxing. So if you go there and just everyday you work on your striking – and don’t worry, they have great wrestlers there as well – but three times a week or four times a week you grapple, and then eight times a week you do solid striking. That’s what I would suggest for him. And then do it for four months in a row or something. Then you’re going to come back, and then you make big steps.

“But go into gym and say – I’ve had some guys that were world champions already; I say ‘I want to teach you some striking’ [and they say] ‘just hold up the focus mitts for me.’ I say ‘well you can pay somebody for that. I’m not going to do that,’ you know. That’s the dumbest thing that you can tell me. You don’t know how to strike, I want to show you how to strike. If you hit the focus mitt with no technique, what is that going to do in a fight? You know, they think that they are there. They think that if they do it three times a week – no double it up. It’s what I did with ground fighting. I lost my last fight by ground fighting. And then I said ‘ok, two, three times a day, seven days a week we’re going to do ground now’ and it changed my life. Like I said, I never lost anymore. But I just flipped it. You have to flip it [training]. If he already has a solid ground game, start striking, and do it a lot.

Look at Heath Herring. Heath Herring was a wrestler. He was fighting in Colorado at the Bas Rutten invitational. He won his fight, he was a wrestler, but he looked really horrible on his feet. And he told me, he said ‘what would you do if you were in my shoes?’ I said ‘you want to have a career?’ He said ‘yeah.’ I said ‘move to Holland. Go to Holland and train there with the best strikers on the planet.’ And he took my advice to his heart, he went to Holland, he lived there for a year and a half, and then his whole reign in Pride came, Pride fighting championship. I mean it changed his life. He even speaks Dutch.

Rutten even had back to Holland advice for the Dutch Alistair Overeem, who is coming off a win over the Dutch Stephan Struve at UFC on FOX 13.

“Overeem looked better in the fight before that also. He doesn’t focus – thank God – anymore on all the power strikes. He just needs to go back to his roots what they taught him at Holland is what I always say. Just single shots. Because everything he throws is hard. He has so much power. If he throws a left, keep the right hand up. If he throws the right hand, keep the left hand up. As soon as he starts making combinations, he leaves himself open and that’s when he gets hit. That’s how he got knocked out a few times now.

“When a guy like that, with striking skills like that comes to America – and I’m not saying anything bad about America’s striking skills – but there’s not many heavyweights that are really good at striking. So if he comes here and he trains with guys who are the low end, you know I don’t think he’ll learn a lot from it. Yeah, then you can start giving combinations, because everybody’s just scared of you.

“Like in Holland, he needed to be scared as well. Because with this guy, [if] you make a mistake, they’re going to knock you down, you know? And these guys go pretty hard. Once they start hard, well then everybody goes hard, you know. So yeah listen, he’s got all the qualities to do it, it’s just his mind. Can he keep it together? Can he keep doing it without PED’s? Because that pretty much really launched his career also, and suddenly being without it; I think it’s a big change for him. But you know, he looked much better in his last two fights, yeah.

CM Punk was the most controversial news two weeks ago. This week of course it was the class-action lawsuit filed against the UFC.

It’s hard. I don’t know the depth of the whole lawsuit and I didn’t go into it yet, and I have to go into it because of Inside MMA,” said Rutten. “I’m going to probably have to talk about it somewhere in the New Year – but you know everybody always wants more money. The top guys, they get well paid. They have a good manager, they get a cut of the Pay Per View, and then it’s up to you. If you can sell a fight and you’re gonna have a lot of Pay Per View buys, then you’re going to make more money.

“Sometimes the lighter weights, they’re complaining and they say ‘yeah some lightweights, they simply don’t pull in the Pay Per View numbers.’ You know, if they pull in 200,000 pay per view numbers, compared to a Cormier and Jones – they’re going to probably go over a million in January because of the whole thing that happened before. You see, those guys are making money, and the other guys are making less now. And I’m not going to say you’re going to have to attack your opponent at the weigh-ins and all that stuff, but I say that you have to sell the fight. You have to start doing something that people are going to be interested to watch that fight – to say ‘oh my god these guys have bad blood’ or whatever. Whatever angle you can find, and hopefully it’s a real angle like a Jones and Cormier. Then people will tune in.

“So it kind of depends on the fighters. And if they don’t pull it in, then that’s too bad. Then hopefully the money is going to raise the basic money. But I believe they all have about – I don’t know what it is. I think it’s about 250,000 dollars it’s basic money, and some maybe 500,000 like a Jones. I think, I never looked into that – But everyone really makes their money with the pay per view buys.

Do fighters get underpaid? Of course. I always say that. And I will always say that until everybody starts to make really good money. Because there are still fighters they simple can’t live from the money that they make. And then they need to fight at least four times a year, which is also not going to happen, you know? So if you only have like two fights and you’re a beginning fighter, and you only make like 10,000 and 10,000 or something even less. Well good luck with that. If it’s 40,000 dollars a year; I don’t know if people know what training costs, and getting good people in, and paying your management, and paying your trainer. Boom. That’s 20 percent gone right there.

“So now it’s only 32,000 from 40,000 dollars. Oh well the taxes are going to come. Ok you can write some things off, but you can’t live on that. So most of the time that money [to live off] comes also from sponsors. You know the sponsor deal actually from Reebook that’s coming up, that sounds really promising to me; you know 70 million. All that money is gonna be spread out amongst the fighters. Of course some fighters get more because they’re more popular. They have this popularity scale, I don’t know how to call it any different. And that’s how they’re going to see, ‘this guy gets so much, that guy gets so much.’ But it’s a lot of money 70 million dollars. And spread out over – I don’t know how many fighters they have. 700 or something? – it’s still a lot of money.

Never one to shy away from controversy, Rutten also said the Rousimar Palhares didn’t hold the heel hook for too long on Jon Fitch at WSoF 16.

Yeah it was good,” he said. “I would have noticed that. I didn’t rewatch it but I would have noticed that, and you also have to put other things in play here. Like Fitch, he [Palhares] had a heel hook before and he was really cranking the heel, but Fitch didn’t tap. And then when he rolled into the kneebar he started [cranking]. Also I think at that moment when he doesn’t tap on a heel hook that’s already there, you know you automatically assume that your opponent has a higher pain tolerance. So maybe it was there, but I really don’t think so.

I think if he wouldn’t have had all those things in the past, those two times, then nobody would have said anything. It’s just because of before it happened, and now everybody’s looking at it and if it’s a second held too long, you know they crucify him sort of thing. So nah, I think it was OK.