Name: JRE MMA Show #12 with Ben Askren
Uploaded: 2018-01-22T22:25:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #12 with Ben Askren' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-01-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JRE MMA Show #12 with Ben Askren' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-01-22. Transcript available.

JRE MMA Show #12 with Ben Askren

Yeah, my oldest one's super.
Here we go.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Ben Askren, ladies and gentlemen.
Dude, I've talked about you on this podcast at least a dozen times.
You are the number one guy that I'm most disappointed never fought in the UFC.
Yeah, I always get, whenever you talk about me, I get like 15 texts like,
hey, Joe's talking about you now.
And, you know, they'll send me clips or whatever.
So, obviously, appreciate that.
But, yeah, I never really got to fight those top guys.
And it was for reasons beyond my control.
Yeah, and you're done now.
Yeah, so I said, I don't want to say I'm done, period.
I said I'm done, excluding the fact that I get to fight and prove I'm number
one.
That would be the excluding factor.
So, if you could get in the UFC, you'd be willing to do it again?
I mean, I don't care where it is.
I really, genuinely don't.
And, obviously, that would be the thing that makes sense.
But there is legislation like the Ali Act and other things going through.
So, I don't know that maybe, you know, I'm still 33.
So, I'm not old.
And, you know, GSP took four years off.
Yeah.
From one fight to the next fight.
So, I'm not going to say I'm going to age overnight.
Well, your style, too.
You avoided so much damage.
I didn't get hit once in 2017.
Really?
Yeah, I didn't get hit once.
Yeah, three fights.
So, yeah.
And that was, you should tell people, you were fighting in 1FC, which is a big
Asian organization.
It's like the Asian version of the UFC.
Yeah.
So, 1FC started in 2012, I think.
Obviously, my contract with Bellator came up in 2013.
And then there was that negotiation process.
And then there was that negotiation process.
And then I obviously went south.
And what happened there?
You were the champ of Bellator.
Yes.
And then all of a sudden you left.
And everybody was like, so you're still undefeated, right?
I'm undefeated.
18-0.
What the fuck happened that Bellator let the champion go?
Well, that wasn't what happened.
No.
And there's so much misinformation out there.
And, you know, I'm popular, but I'm not that popular.
And so, lots of times my story gets mistold because I get spoken over by other
people, right?
And they don't hear what I say.
So, here's what happened.
Obviously, so prior to me and Bellator, Hector and Eddie were the ones that
left, right?
They were, Hector was the—
Hector Lombard and Eddie Alvarez.
Eddie Alvarez was now in the UFC, both of them.
Both the middleweight champ and then the lightweight champ, and they both got
taken care of pretty well.
But if you remember Eddie's situation, I don't know if you remember this,
he got an offer from the UFC, still under the matching period with Bellator.
Bellator says, we matched it, right?
And in terms of what was in the contract, it was matched, right?
But because Bellator has no pay-per-view venue, well, if UFC says, we'll pay
you on pay-per-view,
Bellator says, well, we will too.
But that's not real life, right?
That's fictitious.
They've done two pay-per-view shows ever.
And they've never met any type of threshold.
So, you know, they say it matches, but it doesn't say—I don't know if you
remember,
but they went to court over it.
And the UFC won.
Eddie got the right to—I'm sorry, he didn't win.
He somehow did like a one more fight in Bellator and then went to the UFC.
I don't know exactly what the finality of that case was.
But anyways, when that happened, his contract became public knowledge, right?
And so a lot of UFC fighters were pissed because they gave him a whole bunch of
money.
And so when I was 12-0, I had my last fight in Bellator against Andre Kreshkov,
July 30th, maybe 31st, of 2013.
Beat him up pretty good.
And then I had a 12-month matching period.
And so what was expressed to me by the UFC brass was that you need to get rid
of your matching clause, and we will make you an offer.
But we will not make you an offer until that happens.
Get rid of your matching clause.
How do you do that?
Well, here's how I went about doing it.
Because it's 12 months, right?
That's a freaking—I'm not going to say it over 12 months.
Right.
So I'd call Bjorn every three days and say, hey, Bjorn, I'm not going to re-sign.
Please let me—
Bjorn is the guy who was running Bellator at the time.
Correct, yeah.
And now he got fired.
Yeah.
And Bjorn had a terrible reputation, but I never—I had a decent relationship
with him.
I never, like, butted heads too bad.
So every three days I said, Bjorn, let me go.
I'm not coming back.
And then so everyone says, well, Bellator didn't want to re-sign me.
Well, that's not true at all.
Every three days, Bjorn, let me go.
Bjorn, let me go.
Because, you know, I love challenges.
What I love more than anything in the world is to challenge myself.
If you look at my wrestling career, that's what it's all about.
Taking the next best thing every single time.
And so, yeah, so finally in—and all this time, you know, Dana in the UFC is
saying,
we want Ben Askren, we want Ben Askren.
I'm ranked number seven in the world or, you know, somewhere around there, 12-0.
And so I remember I was going to the Asian food store because I was going to
make some tonka soup.
And Bjorn calls me and said, you're released.
Full, full, you're released.
You can go.
And I said, I appreciate that.
So Friday morning, it was Thursday night.
Friday morning, it's in November sometime, maybe mid-November.
Morning, they fax over the release.
My management faxes it to UFC headquarters.
And all of a sudden that afternoon, there's a, you know, like a little scrum
where everyone's asking Dana questions.
And then Dana says, we're not interested in Ben Askren.
And I said, wait, what just happened there?
Right?
Because for the last three months, they were saying, we were interested, we're
interested, we're interested, we're interested.
Now I finally produced this full release from Bellator that I got, and now they're
not interested.
And so I said, wow, I just got caught in the middle of this.
So was there a reason given?
Well, so, okay.
So then Monday, so then I say, F that.
I buy my, so I bought a plane ticket to Vegas for Monday.
So that was Friday that happens.
I said, fuck that.
I'm going to Vegas.
I'm not taking this shit, you know?
So Monday, I buy my plane ticket to Vegas.
I fly out to Vegas to UFC headquarters.
I met with Lorenzo.
Dana was on the little speakerphone dealie.
And they offered me a Zufa contract, but it would be confidential.
And I would have to fight one fight for the World Series of Fighting, which is
like, well, that's bizarre.
What?
Yeah.
One fight for the World Series of Fighting?
Exactly.
What was your relationship with the World Series of Fighting?
The World Series of Fighting was like a feeder organization at that time.
Something, yeah.
In a way.
Yeah.
Because of Marlon Marais, Justin Gagey, both those guys came from champs over
there to UFC.
I think the relationship is very hazy between the old World Series of Fighting
and the UFC because there was also people that went the other way, right?
Andrei Alarovsky gets dropped from the UFC, goes to World Series.
Anthony Johnson, boom, all these people.
So they say, one fight, one fight.
World Series of Fighting, we will pay, Zufa will pay you.
But you do one fight.
Okay.
I say, well, that's effed up, but okay.
I said, I don't think anyone's going to go for it, but I'll do it.
So I leave, and about six hours later, I got a phone call that says that deal
is no longer available.
We are not going to make you an offer.
Yeah.
So, wow.
And you have no idea why.
Well, so here's my guess.
I've never got to sit face-to-face with him and say, what was your problem with
me?
I think there's four things in my mind.
Number one, he didn't really like me, stemming from the, I called him out on
the steroid thing,
you know, where he said, it's impossible, and this is where our disagreement,
it's impossible
to test all UFC athletes.
And I said, well, that's not true.
USADA does it all over the world for all kinds of athletes, right?
You can do it.
It's just expensive.
But let's just call it what it is.
You're a private business.
You don't have to do drug testing.
Well, obviously, they do it now, so you were right.
They do it now, yeah.
They do it through USADA, so you were totally right.
Yeah, so I was correct.
But that was, you know, when Dana is wrong in an argument, and he's got this
huge army
that follows him, and he said, I'd rather, I think his quote was back, I'd
rather watch
flies fuck than Ben Askren fight, you know?
I think he said something like, Ambien takes Ben Askren to go to sleep.
Yeah, there's a few of them.
So the personal attack started, right?
So that's number one.
Number two, my fighting style is not highly attractive.
But I also think that's a little bit of fake news, because if you look at
George St.
Pierre's, consistently, now obviously McGregor's trumped him, but only a couple
times.
But if you look at consistent bases, George St.
Pierre's the number one draw of all time.
He heavily relied on takedowns and ground and pound.
I mean, he didn't have a finish in like five years or something.
Well, let me say what my take has always been on you and that style, is that it's
important,
and that it really works.
Yeah, absolutely.
What you're able to do really works.
And I've always said this, and it was proven Saturday night in the Stipe Miocic-Francis
Ngannou
fight, wrestling is the most important part of MMA.
Absolutely.
The ability to take the fight to the ground.
Obviously, Stipe has a lot of other attributes.
He took tremendous punches in that fight.
I mean, I know you didn't get a chance to watch it, but-
I saw some highlights, though.
Holy shit.
I mean, the first round was chaos.
I mean, Francis Ngannou's a terrifying guy.
And Stipe took the shots, used great movement, used striking of his own, but
most importantly,
after a while, got his wrestling going.
And then once he got Ngannou to the ground, Ngannou didn't have any answers.
He didn't know what to do.
What you've been able to do to guys like Douglas Lima, who just fought Rory
McDonald for the
Bellator title.
Really good fight.
Korosh Goff, who's another fantastic fighter who has beaten a lot of really top-flight
guys.
Yeah.
You're able to use your wrestling and completely nullify all their striking and
offense.
And that's a huge part of fighting.
Fighting is not what's exciting for people to watch.
Fighting is what actually works.
And what you've been able to do time and time again is take these guys who look
like world
beaters and completely nullify their offense, take them to the ground, and beat
the shit
out of them.
Yeah.
That's huge.
That's very, very important.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so, you know, we can get back to the UFC thing later.
But so, yeah, I mean, when I started fighting, right, it was just like, hey,
let's go fight.
I didn't really make it coaching.
And so I didn't move to Duke's until...
Duke Rufus.
Duke Rufus, yes, until 2010, I think.
So I started...
No, no, 2011.
I'm sorry.
Because I was in Arizona.
I was coaching for Arizona State University.
But when I moved there, I know, hey, there's a lot of elite strikers in this
gym.
I said, but I'm never going to be an elite striker.
But if no one can hit me, they can't beat me.
They're not going to outlast me.
They're not going to outgrapple me.
They're not going to beat me.
If they can't knock me out, they're not going to beat me.
Plain and simple.
So my whole goal was, how do I not get hit?
I don't need to be a great striker hitting people.
I just need to not get hit.
If you can't knock me out, I'm going to eventually get you on the ground and I'm
going to beat
your ass, right?
And so that was kind of my whole goal when I got in MMA.
How do I not get knocked out, right?
And so you said, obviously, I found a really good way to do that.
And it added a lot of longevity to my career where I wasn't taking damage that
a lot of
other people were taking.
And I think there's also a lot of other things to being a really