(Photo via MMAWeekly)
By Elias Cepeda
A while back, retired legend Randy Couture joked that the only way he’d come out of retirement for would be if the UFC offered him a fight against Steven Seagal. Let us repeat that: It was a joke.
Couture is a four-time Olympic alternate in Greco Roman wrestling and one of only two UFC fighters in history to hold world championships in two different divisions. Seagal is an actor and aikido master whose success in real fights is officially undocumented, although his on-set altercations have become the stuff of pants-crapping legend.
The action star has hung around the best fighter in the world, Anderson Silva, for the past few years, however, all the while claiming to coach Silva. It has been hilarious to observe, and Couture’s joke about fighting Seagal clearly played on Seagal’s many audacious claims about his own fighting and coaching abilities while passing himself off as an MMA expert.
Predictably, Seagal didn’t see Couture’s tongue-in-cheek statement as such during a recent interview on The MMA Hour. “I always thought that Randy was my friend and a gentleman. I’m kind of confused as to why he would say that,” Seagal said on the show.
“All I can say is, I’m here. Anybody can find me anytime and anyplace. If Randy really wants to fight me, he can fight me anytime he wants. It’ll be for free, and it’ll be some place where there are no witnesses.” When asked if this hypothetical match would take place under MMA rules, Seagal told Ariel Helwani, “I don’t play by rules. That’s not how I fight.”
Since Seagal’s poor self awareness and lack of humor allowed for him to talk about him fighting Couture as a real possibility, we thought it would be fun to give “Captain America” a call and get his reaction to it all.
“I’m the one that started the joke as an off-handed comment I made to Jay Glazer — that I’d only come out of retirement if it were to fight Seagal. Obviously now somebody has talked to him about it and it has gotten some legs,” Couture chuckled to us over the phone today.
“I’m not surprised that he wants to do it in private, remote location where nobody could see it happen. Obviously I intended it as a joke. I don’t think it would really happen.”
Couture is clearly bemused by the actor’s ominous-sounding statements. Asked if he was intimidated by Seagal’s claim that the fight would be truly no holds barred, Couture neatly replied, “I don’t think that changes the nature of the fight at all.”
So it’s safe to say that Couture is not going to take Seagal up on his battle-to-the-death challenge, then, right? “Hey, it could happen organically I suppose,” Couture ended, simply.