Former UFC heavyweight champion Bas Rutten believes current champ Junior dos Santos will beat Alistair Overeem if they fight this year.
In an interview with the Sherdog Radio Network’s “It’s Time!” show with Bruce
Buffer, the colorful MMA personality gave his thoughts on the matchup and a
variety of other topics, including his Fuel TV show “Punk Payback” and Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos’ positive test for an
anabolic steroid.
Rutten on telling
Overeem’s camp which opponents could make for difficult matchups: “I always
told them … make sure to avoid Junior dos Santos. I think him and Cain
Velasquez, although with Cain, he cannot take a punch too great. But still, Cain
is a monster and he should have simply shot in on Junior dos Santos, I think. I
actually thought he was going to win that fight, but he didn’t. He got tagged,
and that can happen to anybody. Anyway, I always said try to stay away as long
as you can from Junior dos Santos. That right now could be a very big threat
together, believe it or not, with Cheick Kongo. I think that would also be a great opponent
for him.”
On how Overeem matches up with dos
Santos: “I think Alistair, everything he does is one single shot because he
knows he’s got that glass jaw as well. He’s been knocked out quite a few times
in the past, even by Chuck Liddell as well. Every time
when he punches, one hand is up. He throws single shots; he doesn’t throw
combinations. You saw that when he fought [Fabricio] Werdum. Werdum was actually
tagging him more than he did to Werdum. I think that Junior dos Santos, with his
combinations, his reach, I think he’s going to tag him and he’s going to throw
combos and I think that yeah, he’s going to take this fight.”
On Cristiane Santos testing positive for an anabolic steroid:
“You could say it doesn’t come as a surprise. I don’t think anybody was
surprised, but I always say … you’d better [be] 100-percent sure that you know
something before you say it. If I say, ‘Oh, she’s on steroids’ -- I could never
say that. … But yeah, she does have the looks from it. She’s unbelievably
strong. For a woman she just looks very, very extreme muscular, even more so
than bodybuilders.
On Santos saying she
tested positive due to a dietary supplement that she’d been assured was not
prohibited: “I’m also hearing it’s probably somebody on her team that gave
her pills. They said it was OK to lose weight, and I go and I feel sorry because
I’ve talked to her many times. She’s a really sweet lady. If you see her, you
go, ‘Oh, she’s an animal.’ She’s so sweet. It’s unbelievable, but still, it’s
got to be her responsibility because she took it. Even though it was from
friends you trust, I can understand it. I can understand it, but somebody needs
to be blamed here.”
On what Santos should
do now: “You’ve got to do something. If she starts fighting again, this is
what I would do personally. If I know 100 percent I’m innocent … I would say two
months before, I’m going to pay a doctor and they can appoint who it is and they
can come every two weeks and draw my blood or take my urine, whatever it is,
under supervision, just to throw it out there to everybody else, to all the fans
that I’m not using it. That’s the only way, I think, to really clear your name.”
On his Fuel TV show “Punk Payback”: “I thought,
OK, wait a minute. If we make a show like this, we watch the security cameras,
see something happened [and ask] what would I do in a situation like that?
That’s what we did with security cameras. We see a clip. Something bad happens
somewhere, a robbery, whatever it is. I narrate over the clip. I tell the people
at home what they did wrong and I say, ‘OK, let’s see what I would have done in
this situation.’ Then we rebuild the same set or something that looks like it,
and they put me in the spot of the victim and let the people come in -- the
robbers, the punks I should call them -- and I do my job while talking to the
camera. It’s very comedic. There’s no script. Everything’s off the top of my
head, but the techniques I show are real techniques. Everything I show, it’s the
right way to do it.”
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