When Ian Freeman was scheduled to fight Ken Shamrock at the UK’s Ultimate Cagefighting Championship, the messageboards lit up with… Interest. Ken Shamrock hasn’t fought since November of 2010, and many jokes were made about whether or not this main event would actually go down. Shamrock and Freeman were booked together once before, at UFC 43, but Shamrock had to pull out with a torn ACL. Now, Shamrock is pulling out once again, and supposedly it’s due to some sketchy upper management on UCFC’s part.
Or so Shamrock says.
This interview was given to Jack Brown of the Underground, and in it Shamrock reveals that the fight has been off for weeks, yet the promoter keeps selling tickets with Shamrock’s name on them:
Well that fight’s not happening. Unfortunately, like we just got done talking about promoters and things of that nature, that is exactly what happened. We put a contract together and we made a deal. They came back to me, probably after about four weeks, with the contract that we agreed upon and said that, “We don’t want to do that contract.” Ha-ha. I was just like, “Wait a minute. What did you say?” It’s like I’m from another world sometimes. It’s like, “You made a deal, but you don’t want it no more. You want to pay me less. Okay. That sounds great. Let’s just do it then.”
So that’s the stuff that I have to run into now that I’m kind of independent and doing my own thing. A lot of times I run into that, where people, what they do, which is what they’re doing on this, they put my name on the card. They try to sell tickets as much as they can. Then they’ll come back and say, “Well, listen, we can’t pay you this much,” and think that I’m going to go ahead and fight. Even if I don’t fight, they’ve already got those ticket sales and they’ll just blame it on me. They’ll say, “Shamrock is a no-show.”
Now I’ve got my work cut out for me to get that out there so that I can let people know that this was negotiated a long time ago, and these guys are in breach of contract, and they’re the ones not holding up their end of the bargain. So, like I said, now I have to do my due diligence to let my fans and other people realize that, hey, this is the kind of stuff that goes on. Most of the time I wouldn’t do that, but in this situation they keep selling tickets with me supposedly going to be there to fight. Then when I don’t show, they’re going to blame it on me.
They have twenty-five days of breach of contract as of today. So I was like, “What’s going on? You’ve announced that I’m still fighting. You know I’m not fighting. You’re still telling the people that I’m fighting. And you’re in breach of this contract.”
I look forward to the days in MMA where we don’t correctly predict the outcome of a signed bout in the way we predicted this. Why does there have to be such sketchiness abound?
