Joe Rogan discussed CM Punk’s UFC 225 loss to Mike Jackson on his recent The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. While calling Punk a nice guy and a hard-worker, Rogan feels that he “does not have athletic talent.” Rogan added that Punk was a showman in the WWE and “allowed to say, ‘I am the f–kin’ man!’, and WWE had it scripted so that Punk was the man.”
Rogan believes that Jackson had “zero fear” of Punk, and could have stopped him at any point in the fight. As a result of Jackson’s showboating, Dana White has kicked him out of the company, and said that he will never fight in the UFC again, despite winning the fight. Rogan feels that if Jackson would have stopped the match earlier, he would have still been fighting in the UFC. Rogan thinks everything about CM Punk in the fight was weird.
“The whole thing was very weird,” said Rogan. Like, right away, when you see CM Punk holding his hands up and moving stiff and throwing kicks, [I’m like], ‘oh Jesus.’ Like, I don’t like that being on pay-per-view. I understand that they are selling pay-per-view cards, but pay-per-view in the UFC should be the elite fighters.”
Instead of Punk vs. Jackson, Rogan felt that Alistair Overeem vs. Curtis Blaydes should have been on the main card. In addition, he felt that Punk’s sparring videos were “crazy,” and “it was like a guy you just showed how to spar.”
He added, “it’s like you took a dude [with] no wrestling background, no nothing, and you go, ‘alright, this is what I want you to do. This is a jab. This is a right hand. When you throw a kick, I want you to pivot your hips. Go in there and spar. I mean, he just doesn’t have the ability to move his body right. There’s a lot of guys that you could take out there—track and field guys, or football players, and you could get them to fight better than him in a couple of weeks. Easily. Because they’re athletes. They’re athletes. They would understand how to shift their weight, [and] throw a punch… he doesn’t have any talent. That’s all it is. He just doesn’t have any physical talent. For whatever reason. Whether it’s his approach, his intensity. It’s not his coaching. He’s with Duke f–kin Roufus.”
Rogan feels that Roufus did all he could do, but he has to have something to work with. He stated, “If Duke just grabbed some dude from a gas station that has been drinking beer and smoking cigarettes his whole life, and had him in a fight in six months, how much can you possibly expect?”
Sources: The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and WrestlingINC
