Actor And UFC Champion Bas Rutten Explains What A Real Man Is: "A Person Who Can Control Himself"

Actor and UFC Heavyweight Champion Bas Rutten recently explained what a real man is when he was asked about the fact that the hardest fight in his life was conquering himself.

In an interview with Father Dave Nix on his Padre Peregrino YouTube channel, Rutten initially shared, “There’s this line that I use when I do my speaking events for Catholicism and one of these lines is like — and I didn’t come up with this, Leo helped me with it as well. So what kind of man do I want to be? And I said, ‘I want to be a man who can overcome his weaknesses, vices, and imperfections. A man who is not a slave to his passions, emotions, and desires, but just a man who’s in control of himself.’ And when I heard that line, I go, ‘That’s the guy I want to be.’”

He continued, “I want to be nothing can phase me, always good. You don’t need to say, ‘No, I don’t do this. Bad for you. Don’t do this.’ And that was it. And as soon as I printed that in my head that’s the guy I want to be.”

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“Now, in order to become that guy, it’s a fight. It’s harder than fighting professionally, you know,” he shared. “Because all these little tiny things, the little pride things — I talk about it with people — the little things about you open the door for somebody and that person doesn’t say thank you. You get hurt. Somebody’s backing up the car and he doesn’t see you. And you start screaming. All these little stupid things. It’s all pride, pride, pride. If you do it for a thank you, you do it for the wrong reasons. You should do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

“All these things started coming to me and I go, ‘Wow!' It’s very hard to become a real man.’”

From there, he described what it means to be a real man, “A real man is a person who can control himself.”

“That’s what’s wrong with society,” he continued. “The problem is that everybody thinks they can do whatever they want, that’s why they’re free. So then we got alcoholism, we got drugs, we got all these pandemics, sex, porn, all these things that we have. They can’t control themselves. That’s the opposite of being of freedom. You’re being enslaved.”

“That’s why you read, ‘Whatever overcomes a man to that he is a slave.’ And I go, ‘I don’t want to be a slave to that.’ I don’t want to be a slave to alcohol,” he said. “It can’t even talk. Just me looking at it, I go, ‘Maybe, I should get a drink.’”

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Fr. Nix then shared, “This is license versus freedom. We’re called to be free men not men of license ‘cause license has never meant freedom. But we Americans have come to believe doing whatever I want is freedom. No, no, no. Doing what I was made to do is freedom.”

Rutten concurred, “Yeah, and also what they do is they try to sell you happiness. You can’t buy happiness. You can buy pleasure. And that’s how every sin actually starts- with pleasure. But happiness is a completely different thing. Happiness is long-lived. Pleasure is short-lived. Too much pleasure that leads to addiction.”

“So many things that we believe is the opposite,” he observed. “But big Pharma, Big Silicon Valley, Wall Street, everybody explains you can buy happiness. But you can’t buy happiness.”

What do you make of Rutten’s comments about what it means to be a real man?

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