What started as a joke for Randy Couture now might have actual appeal to the UFC Hall of Famer.
In the day and age of celebrity vs. MMA fighter boxing matches, Couture doesn’t necessarily have the itch to return and make some extra cash. However, if he were to step inside the boxing ring, Couture knows which celebrity he’d want to face.
Couture’s “beef” with master Steven Seagal stemmed from a joking conversation with Jay Glazer at a UFC event years ago, when a few journalists misconstrued comments as serious.
“Jay, jokingly said, ‘Hey, we were just talking about you. Who would you come out of retirement to fight?,’” Couture recalled when speaking to MMA Junkie Radio. “I said, ‘Well, if Steven Seagal would sign the contract, I would come out to fight him.’
“Obviously, I was joking. Jay was joking. But the other three journalists that were standing there took that seriously. They went to Seagal and said, ‘Oh, Couture said he’d come out of retirement if you’d fight him.’ He, of course, had a very entertaining response to that.”
Though it was a joke at the time, Couture thinks the sentiment holds some truth today. An actor himself, Couture is somewhat rubbed the wrong way by rumors of Seagal’s mistreatment of stuntmen.
“That would be the guy,” Couture said. “Everybody knows the rumors and all that stuff regarding stuntmen getting injured doing scenes and stuff with him, which does happen on occasion but is not the norm. It seemed like he went out of his way to make it a point of putting a little extra on those situations where you could hurt somebody to make himself look better and prove he was legitimate. That’s where I got started. I got started in stunts. I was lucky enough to get some real acting gigs. For all the stuntmen out there, I will stick to my guns and say Seagal would be that guy.”
Check out MMA Junkie Radio’s full interview with Randy Couture below:
The Blue Corner is MMA Junkie’s blog space. We don’t take it overly serious, and neither should you. If you come complaining to us that something you read here is not hard-hitting news, expect to have the previous sentence repeated in ALL CAPS.