Bas Rutten says “Take care of your knees or else! Bada din-ka din-ka dink!”

Photo of badass Bas courtesy of SportRoids

Actually he didn’t really say that. But seeing as my knee is in recovery I thought I’d share Bas’ situation. From his interview at mmafanhouse:

You’re actually younger than Randy Couture. Is there any chance that you could fight again?
No, there’s not. My knees are a mess. I have no cartilage in both my kneecaps. Zero. Bone on bone. It’s really bad. There’s nothing they can do, except surgeries, until that stem cell stuff. People think a knee replacement, but you can’t do a knee replacement. You can have the best surgeons on the planet, which I already went to, and they say, “Bas, it’s a really bad problem.” …

I can’t do any ground work anymore. If I bike, I have to have a bike with a high seat. I can’t run at all. If I jog half a mile, I can’t walk for five days. It’s so bad sometimes when I walk down my driveway I walk backwards.

Do you think that 10, 20, 30 years from now, we’re going to see a lot of former MMA fighters with serious, long-term injuries?
No. Everybody is training smarter. I have so much explosive power that what happened with me is my training scraped my kneecaps up. People like Randy Couture are training smarter. If you train smart, you’re OK. I was a maniac. I went balls-out every training.

Yikes! I really like Bas and actually learned some of his leg locks, but to read that he can’t do ground work anymore is a shocker. It also made realize how fragile our knees are and that we should take great care of them, and, of course, train smarter.