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#4 Bas Rutten vs. Kevin Randleman, UFC 20 – May 7th, 1999
Despite almost two decades and over 400 UFC events taking place since, the 1999 fight between Bas Rutten and Kevin Randleman for the vacant UFC Heavyweight title remains one of the most controversial in MMA history, with the majority of people who’ve seen it coming to the same conclusion – Randleman was robbed of a victory by the judges.
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This was, of course, a different era in the UFC, and neither five-minute rounds nor the ten-point must scoring system were in effect. Instead, the fight was scheduled for an initial fifteen-minute round, with two three-minute overtime periods if needed, and the three judges would score the fight as a whole.
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The fight was built as a battle between a classic striker (Rutten) and a classic wrestler (Randleman) although of course, both men had shown their skills in other areas too. But on this night it seemed that Randleman’s powerful takedowns would win out. Rutten simply had no answer to them and was unable to stop Randleman from pinning him to the ground, and while there, ‘The Monster’ put a beating on the Dutchman for the majority of the fight.
Rutten came away with cuts under both eyes and a badly broken nose, while Randleman seemed largely unscathed outside of a couple of cuts on his scalp, opened by elbows landed by Rutten from the bottom position of the guard. But somehow the judges saw that work from the bottom – as well as a body kick in the second overtime period – as being enough to award Rutten the victory and title.
Accusations of the fight being fixed somehow still remain to this day – the feeling from that camp is that UFC’s parent company SEG had put all their promotional muscle behind Rutten and felt that he needed to win no matter what – but in reality it was probably a very early case of completely incompetent judges – something that foreshadowed some of the incidents we’d see during later UFC events.
