It's 2016, and Charles "Krazy Horse" Bennett is relevant again. Rizin, and his beef with Wanderlei Silva are a big part why.
Fightful.com's Showdown Joe Ferraro called the action for Rizin's last event, and coincidentally was right in the middle of Bennett and Silva's hotel skirmish hours before the event. On last week's edition of the Fightful.com Podcast, Joe opened up about the situation, how it went down, and what people didn't see on the viral video.
According to Joe, Wanderlei Silva was in great spirits ahead of Rizin.
"I’m at the airport—I’m waiting to take the bus to the hotel. I get there, there’s a Rizin sign right there. I introduce myself to the young lady. She asks for my name—told her my name—and she gets a bus ticket and she takes me out to where the bus is going to come pick me up and then I would say 3 minutes later I get this hand on my shoulder, I turn around and its Wanderlei. I said 'hey what’s going on?' and you know we just start shooting the breeze and we got on the bus together and we rode to the hotel—about 30-35 minutes to the hotel, and we’re swapping story about the kids. He was in a great mood…everything was awesome, we’re laughing, We got off the bus, we got to the hotel and we’re just making sure that if we need to contact each other we had the right information, no problem. We walk in and there’s the Rizin staff “How are you guys? Sign here…” Me and Wanderlei sign in and everything’s blah blah blah," said Ferraro
The Canadian Ferraro then broke down what he thought was a giant misunderstanding between the two long-time rivals. Bennett would go on to TKO Minoru Kimura in seven seconds later in the night.
"We’re just talking introducing ourselves, I see Heath Herring, Jerry Millen -- everything is coolI. ’m going to check in, the door opens from the outside and in walks Charles “Krazy Horse” Bennett. Now, at the top of his lungs -- and obviously I’m not going to use any words that he would use…namely the “N” word -- but he just has his phone out and he says, “Can I get a picture with you “N” word?. Come on “N” word I want to get a picture with you.” I’m looking over to my right and I look over to my left and its Wanderlei, there may have been a misinterpretation because I thought Krazy Horse was being legit, like just saying what happened in the past happened, and now that we see each other its squashed let’s get a picture—let’s get a selfie together. Right? Tell everyone its cool. Wanderlei took that the complete opposite. He basically thought -- and remember there a translation issue here --. He took that a threat. He took that as he was being mocked. I’m looking over thinking 'there’s no way they’re gonna do anything here.' Now, all I’m hearing is these two guys going at each other. Finally they just said, 'Krazy Horse you need to go to your room. Go to your room' and they start bringing him to the elevator. Wanderlei starts just losing his marbles because Charles kept saying something, Wanderlei kept saying something—I won’t show you what Wanderlei was doing with his hands, grabbing a certain region of his body numerous times. I think you may have heard him do an interview saying where he was acting like a Cobra, well you know what Cobra’s do right? They spit. So it got really really hectic and then you see the video go down when they are closer to the elevator, and that poor Japanese staff member of the hotel trying to just prevent the elevator from closing and people are like, “You’ve got to let that elevator close. We’re trying to separate these guys.” It was just crazy all week with those two guys," said Ferraro.
Showdown Joe said that measures had to be taken in order to keep Silva and Bennett apart all week, which ended up not working out so well.
"Eventually, to my understanding, Wanderlei was moved to another hotel just to avoid another circus scenario there. I just find it funny online some people saying its typical Rizin and Japanese MMA—it was all staged (laughter) it wasn’t staged. It was far from staged. Then backstage after the event they went at each other again—well it was more Wanderlei trying to get to Krazy Horse because obviously he had just beaten his dude," Ferraro said.
Bennett and Silva's teammate Cristiano Marcello got into a physical altercation at PRIDE Shockwave 2005, which led to Bennett being choked out. "Krazy Horse" claims to have knocked Wanderlei SIlva out after those cameras rolled.
You can catch last night's edition of the Fightful.com Podcast with Showdown Joe at THIS LINK previewing UFC 204. We'll also have a live post-PPV podcast.
