Mirko Filipovic (also known by his nickname Crocop) was recently asked on a livestream when he will be appearing on Joe Rogan Experience podcast and he seemed very peeved at the question.
Joe Rogan Experience is arguably the biggest platform there is for fans of Mixed martial arts. Over the year that the podcast has been on, Rogan has had countless guests from the MMA world.
Filipovic was forced to retire at 44 years old after suffering a stroke ahead of his Bellator 216 match up against another UFC veteran – Roy Nelson. The rumors are that the stroke was caused by FIlipovic returning to training prematurely after a medical procedure.
“I had bleeding in the brain,” an emotional Filipovic told Dnevnik Nove TV in Croatia.
“I came out of the hospital today and that’s why I wanted to come here to see people feeling good. I had an unbelievable luck in the accident.”
“I was very lucky,” he told ESPN. “I must not take punches to the head ever again.”
Crocop competed from 2001 to 2019. He had amassed an MMA record consisting of 38 wins, 11 losses, 2 draws and 1 no contest. Crocop was in UFC from 2009 until 2011. He was released after suffering back to back losses to Frank Mir, Brendan Schaub and Roy Nelson.
“He angered me, you know, he’s so rude, X times they grab me, start with something positive and then turn to something negative. First they talked that I was carrying millions of dollars in suitcases from Japan… Then someone who was with him on the podcast said that he was in some kind of a vault and saw it. What vault, man? That was never the practice in Pride.”
“He always has something to tell… his hair would grow back if I’d slap him, don’t even think about the podcast. He was very, very dear to me, but now his on embargo [ban] for me.”
Filipovic harbors a grudge against UFC commentator Joe Rogan over how Rogan described PRIDE organization in some of his many MMA centered podcasts.
Over the years Rogan talked a good bit about Pride’s connection with organized crime in Japan in addition to outlining how UFC got hoodwinked buying the promotion.
“The UFC bought this company called Pride. And boy, did they get hoodwinked. Oh, my goodness. The way they did, it was wonderful.”
“First of all, the way that the Japanese have this masterful way of doing negotiating business where they talk to you about like maybe we’ll do business. We’re thinking about doing business, not today. And maybe we’ll come back and discuss this at a later date. Then they would come back when we’re really thinking about selling this business. And then the UFC and Pride started Trading Fighters.”
“They did like a goodwill gesture. So what this did was elevate the brand of pride and make brand pride even bigger in the United States. Like they had Silva come over and he faced off with Chuck Liddell and Chuck Liddell went over there to fight people and they had all this negotiating stuff going on for a long time. And then finally the UFC comes in and buys them out.”
“This big historic thing. Take photos, shaking hands. Turns out they bought nothing. What they bought was essentially like a library of fights. These are all the contracts that the fighters had. The were all bad. They’re all illegal, invalid. They had like a couple of contracts. Some guys they had to take over and like, oh, Jesus Christ, like it was just chaos.”
“And as far as, like, they were going to like run that business over there, but they got over there and they’re like, Oh my God, we can’t run this, but you can’t run it without the Yakuza. People that were all like, you have to have like the consent of the Japanese mob to run the country. The company over there.”
“That was one of the things that like sunk the organization when it was publicly released, allegedly, allegedly that the Yakuza was involved. Everybody’s like, Oh, but they went over there, they bought this, they got this library. And then while they have these UFC employees, the employees all started a new business called Dream, and they just f**king started up with a whole new thing to nowhere.”
“So they, they were like, they bought pride. And Pride’s dead. Like the same Japanese people like, now We have Dream, and they’re like, But hey, you guys were working for us. Where’s our show? What the f**k is this? It’s like they bought. They bought, like, air, you know?”
But apparently the brunt of the anger stems from a Joe Rogan experience featuring Bas Rutten. Rutten alleged that Filipovic was getting paid in cash.
“I don’t know what the Bas is going to say. And if I heard anything about it, I heard it from Bas because Bas worked there and Bass is just f**king hilarious and he’s telling me about how they pay those guys in cash.”