Rampage Jackson lost 27lb in three hours and had to be carried to the scales after almost fighting in sauna
01/06/2025 09:27 AM
Rampage Jackson was informed with just three hours notice that he had to cut 30lb for his first big fight as a professional.
Now a legend of the sport, Jackson got his big break in Japan when he was offered a short-notice shot at Kazushi Sakuraba at Pride 15 in July of 2001. Despite the bout being ostensibly a heavyweight clash, he was asked to make a monstrous weight cut, which he believes was unique to him.
As such, he struggled on to the scales and ended up losing in the first round to Sakuraba. However, once he was in Japan his star began to rise and he ended up becoming a big name in the fight game over on that side of the world.
Rampage Jackson was made to cut 27lb in three hours for Pride debut
For his first fight under the famed Pride banner, Rampage Jackson was called up to face Sakuraba on just a few days’ notice. He was 9-1 as a professional, but this was far and away his biggest mainstream opportunity to date.
“The main thing was they tried to make me lose 30lb and they wanted me to do it the day of the fight,” he told Jake Shields on his podcast ‘Fight Back’, noting that Shields had similar experiences during his time fighting in Japan.
“I said ‘no way’, so they gave me three hours to lose 30lb and this was back when Pride didn’t have weight classes. So I lost 27lb and I said I wasn’t losing no more so I made my team carry me to the scales.
“That was when I first started acting, I was like ‘no I ain’t losing no more weight’. I remember, man, that was hell losing that weight. I almost got in a fight in the sauna because in Japan they want you to go in there naked.”
Jackson has previously claimed that his routine for the weight loss included shadow boxing for 30 minutes in the sauna before regular jumps from hot to cold water and back. This would be difficult to maintain in the nude, so he ended up getting in arguments for breaking with Japanese tradition.
“I was like ‘why do y’all want to look at my d***’?” He continued, with Shields noting that he wasn’t interested in such things. “They got mad, but I had on my sweats and my beanie, I was shadow boxing in there and they were speaking Japanese.
“One of the guys in there could speak Japanese and I asked what are they saying and he said ‘they want you to get naked’ and I told them to get the f*** out of here because you know you get hangry when you’re cutting weight.
Rampage Jackson was defeated by Kazushi Sakuraba
Ultimately, Jackson was allowed to fight and managed to get through five minutes against one of the world’s best fighters at the time. Pride rules were such that the first round of a fight was ten minutes, and the other two were five.
Rampage made it past the halfway mark in round one, but had been instantly taken down in the early exchanges. He managed to land two slams that he had predicted to commentator Bas Rutten, which he would later use to knock out Masaaki Satake.
However, the lifts to get Sakuraba down seemed to tire Rampage out and caused him to become sluggish after an explosive few minutes. He managed to escape a number of submissions, but was eventually caught in a rear naked choke and tasted defeat again.
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