Kade Ruotolo just revealed that he almost got into a fight with boxing star Ryan Garcia the very first time that they crossed paths. Given that both men are at the very top of the combat sports world, it’s unsurprising that they’ve met before. Kade was recently in the background during an interview with Sportskeeda that his brother Tye Ruotolo was taking part in, ahead of his upcoming match against Jozef Chen. That was when Tye was asked about Garcia and he beckoned Kade to come over in order to tell the story of how they met:
“We went to get some dessert downtown Huntington Beach… My chick, my sister, and i had one other friend that was with me too… We see Nate Diaz and his whole crew walk by like ‘what, no way!’ we start rapping out, talking, stories… Ryan Garcia hops out of some Escalade with like a couple of his boys or whatever. He just comes straight into my zone, and starts like ‘why are you taking pictures with Nate?’ like right up in my face. So I kinda just pushed him back and told him ‘I don’t like your energy.”
According to Ruotolo, that’s when things started to escalate quickly:
“As soon as I kinda pushed him back his eyes got all big, so I thought we were going to scrap. He was looking like a little boy, I was like ‘that’s an easy one’, you know? and then he turns to his bodyguard and throws his bodyguard in front of me. This guy comes like ‘you pushed him!?’, I’m just squaring off with his bodyguard like ‘I didn’t do anything!’”
Kade Ruotolo makes it sound like one big miscommunication and although things could have ended pretty badly, he explained that Ryan Garcia eventually helped to diffuse the situation:
“Long story short, he ended up apologizing and he said ‘you’d probably break my arm!’ and all this stuff. I think it was just a drunken night for him, more or less.”
The full interview with Kade Ruotolo where he details the moment he almost got into a fight with Ryan Garcia was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Sportskeeda: