This is another episode that has people scratching their heads about Ken’s training methods. Ken decides to let the guys have an easy day and shows them old UFC videos. After a couple of minutes, the guys start to get restless and just start working out on their own by shadow boxing, jumping rope and hitting the bag, while Ken was standing by watching the video. Tito had another tough training session with the guys. Most of them were complaining about Matt Hamill going full speed instead of 40-60% during practice.

With the choice of who gets to fight, Tito picked Michael Bisping to take on Kristian Rothaermel for a battle of UK vs New Orleans. A lot of the bulletin boards were questioning Kristian’s record of 40-3. Sherdog had Kristian with a 4-2 professional record. On MMA.tv Jeremy Horn comments:

“when i fought kris in ’99 (i think) he was like 25-1. there were lots of fights going on everywhere back then. its very possible for him to have that record. i have about 20-25 fights on shows like that that are not listed anywhere. in ’99 i had like 40 or 45 fights, i fought almost every weekend sometimes twice or more. on sherdogs database they have about 20 of them listed.”

The day of the fight, Kristian enjoyed a cigar and some lemonade to the surprise of some of the other fighters. Cigars and lemonade normally isn’t considered the breakfast of champions.

The fight itself was fairly one-sided and dominating in Bisping’s favor. He really has some good hands and was throwing a lot of bombs that were connecting. Kristian seemed to have trouble with the standing game and made numerous attempts to take Bisping down, but couldn’t seem to do much once he had him down. Bisping kneed Kristian in the head opening a big gash that sent a stream of blood down his face. With his lack of conditioning, Kristian just couldn’t keep up. Bisping’s punches just kept landing and it was apparent that Kristian was starting to get wobbly. After a point, Big John McCarthy had to step in because it was apparent that Kristian just wasn’t able to defend himself sufficiently anymore.

I personally had thought that Kristian was going to go all the way. Hopefully, we might still get to see him again in the UFC and see if there really is more to him than we saw during that fight.

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