[TLK]

Report: Ken Shamrock was going to be “paid to stand with him as well”

By Zach Arnold | October 7, 2008 | Print This

Update: In this radio interview (time mark - 40 minutes), Dave Meltzer claims that he had heard about the Seth Petruzelli “stand-up” scenario before Petruzelli himself brought it up on the radio on Monday morning.

“He’s backtracking. Uhm… I will also say that the story that he said, I had heard that story, uhm, long before, uh Seth Petruzelli said it. So, I believe it to be true. I cannot tell you that as a fact.”

Meltzer hopes that the athletic commission(s) looks into this and that this type of demand should not be allowed unless the commission sanctions a fight specifically as a stand-up match and markets such a bout to the public that way.
Start of original posting
This report is in the latest edition of Figure Four Weekly, published by Bryan Alvarez:

Seth Petruzelli said that he was paid to stand with Kimbo. Well, he said that and then he claimed he never said it. For what it’s worth, we heard in the days leading up to the fight that Ken Shamrock was being paid to stand with him as well. It’s a pretty shady way of doing business, and while it’s not outright working the fight it is attempting to give one man an advantage — or a perceived advantage, as did didn’t help Kimbo one goddamn bit — over another.

You can subscribe to Bryan’s publication by going to F4WOnline.com.
Within the timespan of 24 hours, we have Seth Petruzelli’s radio interview comments on EXC management allegedly ‘kinda’ hinting that they wanted him to stand-up only against Kimbo Slice and now we have Bryan Alvarez putting his name on the line by flat out reporting that Ken Shamrock was going to be ‘paid to stand with [Kimbo]’ as well. The audio already exists of Petruzelli’s comments, and Alvarez has put his reported claims in print to his readership.
Now, compare Petruzelli’s initial comments and Alvarez’s report to comments Jared Shaw made to MMA Weekly last night:

“Why in a million years would we ask Seth to not take Kimbo down? That’s crazy. That’s all Kimbo’s been working on is the ground game. Ken Shamrock, 84 percent of his wins are submission and through the ground, so Kimbo was ready for the ground. If anybody knows Seth Petruzelli, he’s a K-1 fighter, I wouldn’t want him standing. So to say ‘don’t take him down,’ that’s ridiculous.”

Petruzelli lost his two matches in K-1 competition, including a loss to Bob Sapp… all of this in 2004.
Fight fixing or bribery to alter the outcome of what is supposed to be a legitimate, sanctioned fight is a felony in the United States. Again, this is not Japan. This is not professional wrestling. Elite XC’s event was sanctioned by the Florida State Athletic Commission. There’s a lot of reasons to care about this story. If what Petruzelli and/or Alvarez said is true, then people involved in the production of last Saturday’s event should be prosecuted. Prosecutions for similar-type crimes has happened before in the fight industry, so there’s no excuse to let this incident go unpunished if indeed any crimes were actually commited.
In regards to media coverage of this situation, this should not simply be a one-day-and-go-away news story. We are talking about the image of MMA being tarnished in the States and the implications are damaging for everyone involved in the business. It’s a lousy scenario for everyone who supports this business and a fight fixing scandal of this magnitude could certainly turn off potential corporate sponsors — the kind of corporate sponsors Elite XC wants to get to survive as a company if they want to make it to their fourth event on CBS.

It goes from bad to worse...