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Inside MMA airs on HDNet every Friday night at 9PM ET.

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More segments after the jump.

Yesterday I said Bas Rutten would be a huge star today if only his career had started a decade later. This hilarious video from FIGHT! Magazine is one of the reasons why.

Of the thousands of mixed martial artists in the world only a small percentage of them will ever attain stardom in this sport. With his undeniable talent, crowd-pleasing fighting style and charismatic personality, Bas Rutten would have undoubtedly been one of them. He just fought in the wrong decade, long before two guys named Forrest and Stephan sent the sport’s popularity skyrocketing.

Age still hasn’t stopped guys like Randy Couture and Mark Coleman from competing on the sport’s largest stage, but unlike them, Bas has two bad knees that guarantee he’ll never fight again. Bas seems okay with it, but if you ask him where he thinks he would rank amongst the world’s top fighters if he was 20 again like FIGHT! Magazine did, he would tell you he’d make it to the very top. And you know what, I like to believe he would. It’s just a shame we’ll never find out.

You know that age old question, if you could pick one person to have dinner with, who would it be? Well, I’m breaking the one person rule here, but I would definitely go with Bas Rutten and Don Frye. I could sit and listen to those two guys tell stories for hours on end.

Inside MMA airs on HDNet every Friday night at 9PM ET.

Inside MMA Archive

Segments with Georges St. Pierre, Brian Bowles and Bas Rutten on Kimbo Slice after the jump.

Kimbo didn’t stop listening to Bas because he was a bad teacher. He quit listening because he was sick and tired of doing so many damn PUSH UPS!

“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? But its all good, we all do what we gotta do.”

—Kimbo Slice, via Fighters Only, commenting on his time as Bas Rutten’s pupil

Naturally, Bas Rutten wasn’t too happy with Kimbo’s comments, and issued a response.

I never said “I tried to teach you stuff but its not working”, I don’t say the word “stuff” when I mean skills or technique, I said, I try to teach you skills but you are not listening…Pretending to be a friend and getting paid GOOD for my work? Ha ha, OK, lets see here…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…Since I believed in him, and considered him a friend, I said NO to a whole bunch of commentary jobs because I wanted to be there for him for the entire time. Meaning, I actually LOST money training Kimbo. Well, actually, with the last fight (because they re-negotiated), I think I evened it out, but never made money.

That’s just a short excerpt. You can read Bas’ full response at Fighters Only.

Image via Esther Lin

Inside MMA airs on HDNet every Friday night at 9PM ET.

Inside MMA Archive

More segments celebrating Inside MMA’s 100th episode after the jump.

Apparently, NET10 liked Bas Rutten’s self defense training videos so much they decided to make a series of viral videos out of them promoting their cell phone company (actually not a bad idea if this goes viral like the original did). The gimmick, “cell” defense, is a little cheesy, but man does Bas deliver. Hilarious!

One more after the jump.