Quinton Jackson has been in the game for a long time.<\/p>\n
When \u201cRampage\u201d fought Japanese MMA legend Kazushi Sakuraba way back in July 2001, however, Jackson was just 23 years old with a dozen professional bouts to his name. He was still a relative nobody, whereas Sakuraba was already \u201cThe Gracie Hunter,\u201d a UFC tournament winner with victories over multiple top talents like champions Royce Gracie, Carlos Newton, and Vitor Belfort.<\/p>\n
Sakuraba was also a massive star in Japan, while Jackson was making his first trip to \u201cThe Land of the Rising Sun\u201d for his PRIDE FC debut. In a recent appearance on the Coach Tim Welch\u2019s Red Hawk Recap<\/a> podcast, Jackson explains why PRIDE wanted him to lose, bullied him into cutting weight needlessly, and allegedly poisoned him to boot!<\/p>\n \u201cMy worst [weight] cut was when I had to fight Sakuraba. There were no weight classes, but they made me lose 27 pounds and gave me three hours to do it,\u201d Jackson said (via Curtis Calhoun<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cThey wanted me to do it the day of the fight, but you can\u2019t do that. They wanted me to be like, really weak. I\u2019ll say this right now: f\u2014k PRIDE FC because of the way they treated me. I know people may not believe me, but I really do think they poisoned me or something. If you understand what Sakuraba was to PRIDE back then \u2026 I got the stuff that they give you [for weight cuts], and I had an upset stomach and then after the fight with Sakuraba, as soon as the fight was over in the locker room, I took a mean s\u2014t and then I felt fine. These people who were my \u2018handlers\u2019 that my manager had to deal with, they were evil \u2026 they were like the Hunter Campbells of PRIDE, chemists, that\u2019s what their profession was.<\/p>\n \u201cThey hated my guts,\u201d Jackson continued. \u201cWhen I fought Sakuraba, I was jet lagged, and more worried about s\u2014ting myself instead of getting armbarred. It was a miracle that I even made it to that fight, because I had to pretend that I was totally dehydrated. I lost 27 pounds, and then I didn\u2019t want to cut the weight anymore. To lose that much weight in three hours, could you imagine? I told them to carry me to the scale, that\u2019s when I first started my acting career [LAUGHS].\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, Jackson would go on to become a major star in PRIDE and Japan before eventually capturing UFC gold six years later. Sakuraba, meanwhile, would continue to fight the best of the best while severely undersized for years to come, but he was arguably at his peak that night versus \u201cRampage.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the poisoning? It\u2019s not the first time PRIDE FC has faced criminal accusations and shady dealings; that\u2019s part of the reason why the promotion imploded two decades ago! In terms of credibility, I would rank Jackson\u2019s conspiracy theory as more feasible than Nick Diaz getting poisoned by a faulty IV<\/a> ahead of his title fight versus Georges St. Pierre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quinton Jackson has been in the game for a long time. When \u201cRampage\u201d fought Japanese MMA legend Kazushi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,40762,785,85,1396],"class_list":["post-567585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-ufc-mma-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}