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Ed Ruth doesn’t want to pad his record in Bellator.
Ed Ruth wants the very best Bellator has to offer, even if it jeopardizes his pretty win-loss record.
Ruth (7-1) has exclusively competed for Bellator since turning pro. His sole loss comes at the hands of Neiman Gracie in the opening round of the Bellator Welterweight Grand Prix. His big step-up in competition did not go his way, but Ruth is not deterred.
“Even after this fight with Jackson I feel ready to step back into the ring. I don’t really care how many times I will fail at the higher levels, as long as you put me up there and give me the opportunity I’m still going to go for it. I feel like I’m ready for it,” he told Bloody Elbow ahead of Bellator 231. “I tell them I take every fight. Whoever they send to me, if the name’s on the paper, I’ll sign it. Going forward in this game, I don’t want to be too picky.”
Ruth has recently parlayed his MMA success into the world of modelling. It was something that just sort of happened.
“I saw another guy in the gym doing it. He was like, ‘you can model. You’re a good looking guy, you got muscle.’ That was enough for me,” Ruth laughed. “That was enough for me. If I can do something big with it, I will. The exact same thing Luke Rockhold did. It’s another avenue to make money.”
The three-time NCAA Division I national champion also touched on how his gym has been fiddling with new-age technology.
“I definitely think it can help with slips, reaction times, a lot of things,” he said of virtual and augmented reality. “They’re already doing it with these iPads now. Just the other day they had a pad on the ground. You look at the iPad and you try to chop your feet and see how many times you can touch those dots on the pad. I think virtual reality can really kick the training up a notch.”
Ruth (7-1) fights former LFA welterweight champion Jason Jackson (10-3) at Bellator 231 on Friday, Oct. 25. The event is headlined by Frank Mir vs. Roy Nelson II.