With Move to 170 Pounds Underway, Ed Ruth Visualizes Bout vs. Bellator Champ Rory MacDonald
Ed Ruth’s official 170-pound debut may have been put on hold, but the three-time NCAA national champion wrestler still has big plans for his move to the welterweight division.
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After beginning his Bellator MMA tenure with four consecutive victories at 185 pounds or higher, Ruth was scheduled to make his welterweight debut at Bellator 196 in Budapest, Hungary, on Friday. After original foe Laszlo Furko withdrew due to injury last week, Ion Pascu agreed to step in and face Ruth in a 175-pound catchweight bout. The change didn’t faze Ruth, however.
“It’s not so bad,” he said. “Whoever wants to come fight me, that’s
who I fight.”
Bellator 196 is headlined by a lightweight clash between Benson Henderson and Roger Huerta and airs on Paramount Network via tape delay in the United States at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT. Ruth vs. Pascu is scheduled for the main card.
While Ruth won’t make the full cut to 170 pounds to face Pascu, the weight class will eventually be his new home. He says the move was a natural as he transitioned from his wrestling career to MMA.
“I just started working out more, doing more MMA workouts,” Ruth said. “Everything’s different. For wrestling, you lift more weights, you do more explosive training. You’re only in the ring for about seven minutes, six minutes once you go to freestyle. In MMA, that’s 15 minutes you’ve got to be in there with somebody else trying to knock your block off. I just started training more toward MMA and keep my conditioning up. Trying to find ways to perfect my technique.
“In the midst of all that, my weight’s been coming off like nothing.”
Ruth’s first two fights in Bellator were at catchweights of 192 and 189 pounds before he earned a pair of victories at middleweight, including a second-round knockout of four-time UFC veteran Chris Dempsey in his most recent outing this past November. While Ruth never felt undersized in those bouts, the 5-foot-11 Dethrone Base Camp representative did notice that height could be a factor down the road. Still, that wasn’t something that seriously influenced the move.
“I didn’t feel like I was smaller, but I did feel like I was a little short,’ he said. “Some of the 185 pounders, Luke Rockhold is about 6-4. Even [Bellator middleweight champ] Rafael Carvalho is about 6-2. Everybody has a lot of height. It wasn’t something that turned me off from the weight. If anything, I wanted to stay at 185 because I like putting on weight and lifting heavy. But my weight just came down so naturally that my managers were like, ‘Hey, you can fight at 170.’ Why not? It won’t even be that hard of a weight cut.”
Bellator has moved slowly with Ruth thus far in terms of matchmaking, but he is nonetheless confident when he envisions facing someone like MacDonald down the road.
“I want it to be a battle. But I definitely see myself coming out on top,” he said. “I always look forward to having a good fight. I don’t look forward to going out there and losing or just coming close. I want to go out there and have a good battle, and I want to take it away from him.”
For now, Ruth doesn’t have a timeframe in mind for making it to the top of Bellator’s welterweight division. He is just simply confident that the moment will eventually arrive.
“Whenever you’re ready for it, you’re just ready. There’s never like a timeframe,” Ruth said. “Even when I put a timeframe on the time that I wanted to beat somebody, it would never really happen at the time…I always just tell myself instead of a timeframe, just know that it’s gonna happen and it’s gonna happen soon. I always want my mind to be ready.”
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