Shamrock to critics: Stop age discrimination!

When Bellator announced that Ken Shamrock would be fighting Royce Gracie at Bellator 149 on February 19th, many fans rolled their eyes.

Memes came out regarding the fight, joking that it would be sponsored by Life Alert, pointing out that the combined age of the two men will be 100 years old on fight night.

With that being said, Ken Shamrock believes that the MMA community needs to stop discriminating against fighters because of their age.

He spoke to Submission Radio:

“It’s sad that we’re at this point. After we’ve gone through so much in our world to get it across to people that you can do things, whatever you want to do, just as long as you’re able to stay within the rules and the guidelines and be able to do the things you need to do. That you just should never quit, should always move forward and try to do the things that you want to do, accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish.”

“And yet we’re standing here in 2015 and we are discriminating against age. I mean, when does it stop?” he said. “I mean, we go in the ring and we fight just the same as anybody else does. And we passed the physicals, and we do the things that we need to do to be able to get in the ring and fight.”

To further make his point, Shamrock went on to compare the discrimination against older MMA fighters to discriminating against people of another race.

“And yet we’re standing here today, after we’ve gone through the racism of black people and we’ve gone through the women’s rights and the Japanese, you know, with the world war and putting them in the work camps because they look Japanese. I mean, I thought we had gotten past all this?”