Former UFC heavyweight champion and MMA legend Bas Rutten believes that Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov is the fight fans want.
McGregor’s mooted boxing bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr. has dominated sports headlines for almost a year. The publicity surrounding a fight featuring an MMA striker versus a supremely accomplished boxer has garnered interest in all quarters, but nowhere more than the world of MMA.
While the general consensus appears to favor Mayweather Jr. in a pretty straight forward win, there are many who believe that McGregor’s unpredictability and raw power could potentially cause massive problems for the 40-year-old, multi-weight world champion boxer.
There are, of course, those who have had enough of the incessant headlines and overbearing nature of the PR circus surrounding the sideshow. One man who appears to be in that camp, at least for the time being, is Bas Rutten. Currently starring in his own comedy sketch show (The Bas Rutten Experiment), the MMA pundit and former PRIDE commentator spoke to Starsport in England to sound off his objections to the matchup:
“He should fight in MMA now. You [McGregor] decide to do MMA first, let’s focus on that first,” Rutten told Starsport. “If you want to box later on, then I say, ‘Yeah, go do boxing.’”
“But right now, let’s focus on the problems at hand and the tough guys like Khabib Nurmagomedov and see if he can fight them.”
While Nurmagomedov is unbeaten in 24 professional fights (and is the #1 ranked title challenger to the Irishman) his inability to show consistency inside the octagon works against his long-term aspirations. Several injuries and fight pull-outs have landed the excellent Russian with a reputation of being unreliable when it counts – this of course was further punctuated with Nurmagomedov’s hospitalization with weight cutting issues prior to UFC 209 earlier this month.
Rutten, however, believes that the only tests which matter to McGregor should be inside the octagon:
“Those are important fights for him,” Rutten added. “We’re talking about a guy who is undefeated and everybody wants to see that fight.”
