Kevin Randleman Speaks

Commission chairman Dr. Tony Alamo said at the hearing, "We need to protect you from yourself... if you had told the doctors about your medical condition, you would not have been cleared to fight." Alamo also expressed concern that with Randleman could have potentially passed the infection along to his opponent, Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, if both of them had sustained open cuts during the fight, which is not an uncommon occurrence in MMA. Fortunately, neither fighter was cut during the fight.

Randleman said during the hearing, "I was wrong. I was very wrong. I should have come to you and said, 'Ladies, gentlemen, I have a problem here, but all I wanted to do was fight... I'm extremely sorry for the deception... I had 16 months of pure hell."

At the hearing, NSAC commissioner John Bailey summed up the commission's issue with full medical disclosure and the danger that Randleman put himself in: "Sometimes we have to protect fighters from themselves... You were not healthy in this case, and you did not make the right judgment. You cannot really provide us any assurance that if there were a fight next week, that you would not try to fight next week, irrespective of the fact that your health is bad. We have to protect you when you can't protect yourself. You have demonstrated that you can't protect yourself and that you will deceive us instead of protecting yourself. You could have gotten killed in that ring."

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