Rico: “I was too emotional, but that fight was never going five rounds”

There is no better response to critics than to make them eat their words. Rico Verhoeven (45-10, 11 KO’s) force-fed his detractors a two-course meal in the GLORY 19 main event as he beat bitter rival Errol Zimmerman (103-12-1, 44 KO’s) and retained the World Heavyweight Championship.

A lot of words were exchanged between the two before the fight and that translated into an opening round which showed us a very different Verhoeven to the one we’ve seen before. He came out throwing heavy leather immediately and was rewarded when he rocked Zimmerman inside the first thirty seconds.

Verhoeven was pleased at the time - enjoying himself, even - but his cornermen could not believe what they were seeing and were screaming for him to end the brawl and fight with his usual cold technicality.

“From my point of view the first round was a little too emotional. I hit him with some clean shots and rocked him and after that I got a bit emotional and I thought ‘OK now I am going to knock you out with your own combination,’” he laughs.

“I think I rocked him like two times in that round. Then I went to my corner in between rounds and got hit again - this time by my trainer! He said ‘What are you doing?! You are crazy, you are making it a 50-50 fight! Why are you doing this?! Stick to the gameplan!’

“It was like I went from Earth to Mars, totally crazy, so [in the second round] I came back down to Earth and back to the gameplan, just hitting him with the jab and moving off. I was totally controlling that fight - hitting him hard with the low kick, the body kick, the front kick. He didn’t know which side things were coming from.”

Things ended abruptly in the second round when Zimmerman, behind on points, attempted a spin-kick to Verhoeven’s midriff. It missed and at some point in the delivery of the technique Zimmerman suffered a complete tear to the patella muscle of his right knee.

He went down in agony; the referee and ringside physician consulted but it was clear that Zimmerman could not even stand, let along continue the fight. And so the bout was waved off, with Verhoeven declared the winner by TKO.

As happy as Verhoeven was to retain the title, he felt slightly cheated by the ending. He had wanted to answer his critics with a decisive stoppage win of his own doing and felt he was well on the way to achieving that before the events of the second round.

“From my point of view I was controlling the fight and there was no way it was going to go to the fifth round. No way; never. It was sad for Errol how it ended but I was definitely dominating the fight and there was no way he was going to make it to the end,” he says.

Verhoeven has had to deal with incessant comments about the amount of KO wins on his record. His detractors claim he should be doing more to try and knock his opponents out, although his camp are more than happy with the technical dominance he has displayed in his rise through the GLORY ranks.

“People say certain things about KO power or whatever but it is what it is. I try to keep my win percentage as high as possible,” he says.

“With the way I was fighting in the first round your win percentage goes down because it becomes 50-50: I rock him, he rocks me. It’s a dangerous game and I don’t like to play it. We roughed it up a little bit [in the first round] and in the second round we got back to the gameplan.

“Words don’t hurt, people can say what they want. But at the end of the day you are still human and you think about stuff and about why they are saying it. And in all the pre-fight interviews you had Errol with his big mouth saying he was going to hurt me, kill me, put me in my place, do it with one punch, all that stuff… That’s just not my thing, I don’t say stuff like that.

“To me it’s like, I’m the champ, everybody wants my belt, that’s all there is to it. I respect everybody, everybody trains hard and this is one of the toughest sports there is, one of the toughest jobs there is. I know what everybody has to go through. But in the first round yeah, emotions got the best of me.”

Zimmerman has already undergone surgery to address the torn patella muscle and now begins the long road to recovery. In the meantime, Verhoeven will take a few days off to relax with his family and will then return to the gym to maintain his training and prepare for the next challenge. But who looks likely to be the next contender?

“I think it’s going to be Benjamin [Adegbuyi], he’s an upcoming guy,” is Verhoeven’s opinion. “But for me he hasn’t fought too many big names yet.

“He beat Hesdy [Gerges] last time [he fought, at GLORY 18], it was a good fight. I think he’s a good challenger but from my point of view he is not there just yet, he still needs to be built. But definitely I think he could be one of the big guys someday.”