On the mats, ONE Lightweight Submission Grappling World Champion Kade Ruotolo moves with a purpose few can match. However, on a fishing boat, he slows everything down to a crawl and loves every second of it.

After an extended period away from the spotlight, the American phenom makes his long-awaited return against Hiroyuki “Japanese Beast” Tetsuka in a lightweight MMA battle at The Inner Circle, which airs live in Asia primetime from Bangkok’s Lumpinee Stadium on Friday, May 15.

Fans can stream this fight, and many more, exclusively on live.onefc.com.

This marks Ruotolo’s first bout in over a year, as he had been recovering from a complete ACL tear. He suffered the injury during a training session just a week after submitting Nicolas Vigna to go 3-0 in his MMA career at ONE 171: Qatar in February 2025.

The road back to the global stage has been a long one. Twelve months of hard work, even harder days, and the kind of quiet battles that never make the highlight reel.

So once the knee was stable enough to allow it, Ruotolo reeled in the one thing that had always quietly anchored him outside the gym:

“I was able to watch my brother pick up some great performances. So, that was great. But for my personal satisfaction and joy, it was pretty rough for sure – not being able to really do anything. I even had to learn how to walk again.

“Besides the physical therapy, just trying to get the knee back in action, fishing was a good thing for my mental health. After the first or second month, when my knee was stable enough, I started fishing again.”

The line back to fishing was not a new one. Kade and his twin brother – reigning ONE Welterweight Submission Grappling World Champion Tye Ruotolo – grew up in Southern California, where the open sea was always within reach and the days off the mats led to fun times in the ocean.

If it was not skateboarding or surfing, which provided them with the thrills athletes typically seek, fishing was their preferred activity. And once they reached their teenage years, the brothers were old enough to charter a boat and set sail with their fishing poles. To them, it was a sense of freedom.

Ruotolo told onefc.com:

“We’d go get on a boat in the ocean in the middle of nowhere and just go catch some fish when we wanted to get away from our parents. Sometimes, we’d bring them with us.

“So, that was probably the age when we started to get hooked on it, and ever since then, it’s always just been jiu-jitsu, surfing, and fishing. Skating a little bit too, but those have always been our biggest passions.”

For all the technical demands of fishing – the patience, the precision, the reading of the water – what keeps Ruotolo coming back has very little to do with the catch itself.

The lightweight submission grappling king is drawn to it due to the silence and space it provides him. Out on the water, the noise comes to a pause. The endless internal dialogue every fighter carries around with them stops. 

And for the few hours he is out there, the man who has built a career around relentless forward motion gets to do the one thing his entire profession refuses to allow: absolutely nothing at all.

The 23-year-old explained:

“I think there’s just something about the ocean that we’ve always been drawn to. Being in the water feels very healing. The ocean is healing, and it’s a completely different world out there.

“There aren’t many places where I live where you can go get away from everybody, but you go get on a boat in the water, and you look around, and there’s no one around. It’s a pretty cool feeling.”

Out On The Water, Where The Best Stories Live

That love of the water eventually led to a purchase that has paid for itself many times over.

A few years ago, the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Champions and a close friend put down US$3,000 each and bought themselves a slice of independence on the open Pacific. 

The vessel itself was never going to win any beauty contests. But for the Ruotolos, who have always preferred function over flash, that was exactly the point:

“The boat is one with a little center console. It has a little cabin, too, for a couple of people to crash overnight. Every time we get a free chance and the boat’s still running good, we’ll get out on the water and go catch some fish. It’s definitely one of our favorite ways to pass time.

“It’s nothing crazy, but it gets the job done. It’s plenty of fun. We’ve been to Catalina a couple of times, and man, that was a trip of a lifetime, just spending the night out there and fishing all night. So fun.”

Before the boat came along, the brothers leaned on the charter scene that runs up and down the Southern California coastline.

San Diego was always one of their favorite spots, and Davey’s Locker in Newport Beach offered day trips and three-quarter-day excursions for around US$100 a head. Every charter trip planted a little more conviction that one day, the twins would have a vessel of their own.

That day eventually arrived. And ever since then, the question has been how soon they could get time off from their careers to make it happen. 

Sometimes, that means a quick hour off the jetties before sunset. Other times, it means a fully planned overnight run that turns into one of those trips you remember for the rest of your life.

Trips like that come with stories, and in fishing, these tales almost always come back to the same currency: the catch. 

For every angler who has ever pushed off from shore with a rod in hand, the bigger the fish, the bigger the bragging rights, and the longer the story gets to live in the family group chat.

The Ruotolo brothers are no different. Years of trips, charters, and overnight runs have produced a small but growing highlight reel between them, and Kade is more than happy to give credit where it is due.

He said:

“My brother caught a big yellowtail. For me, it’d probably be either a smaller grade yellowtail or a tuna. I still haven’t caught too big of a fish, like maybe close to 20 pounds is my biggest fish. But my brother has definitely caught one probably closer to 30 pounds.”

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In the modern landscape of mixed martial arts, fighters utilize state-of-the-art sports science, hyperbaric chambers, and perfectly calibrated strength and conditioning programs to gain a competitive edge.

But occasionally, an athlete emerges whose physical power was forged not in a high-tech facility, but in the unforgiving crucible of absolute hardship. 

Reigning ONE Bantamweight MMA World Champion “The Tormentor” Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is the terrifying embodiment of that raw, unrefined power.

The Mongolian superstar has captivated fans around the globe with his suffocating grappling and an unbreakable, vice-like grip that has dismantled some of the best fighters on the planet.

Most famously, Baatarkhuu showcased this explosive upper-body strength when he claimed the organization’s bantamweight MMA crown by wrapping his arms around the neck of former divisional king Fabricio “Wonder Boy” Andrade at ONE Fight Night 38 last December.

Once the Mongolian locked in the rear-naked choke, it was less like a standard submission and more like an industrial steel trap snapping shut. Andrade had no choice but to tap out or go to sleep.

But that world-class squeeze was not built in a gym. Long before he was strapping ONE Championship gold around his waist or capturing the attention of millions as a member of Team Mongolia on the hit reality show Physical: Asia, “The Tormentor” was a young man breaking his body against the earth to survive.

Forged In The Mountains Of Mongolia

To understand the impressive functional strength of the bantamweight MMA king, one must look back to the dark, freezing confines of the Mongolian mines.

At an age when most aspiring athletes are focused on amateur tournaments and high school wrestling brackets, Baatarkhuu was quite literally tearing minerals from the ground using nothing but his flesh and bone. Without access to proper industrial tools, he relied entirely on his hands to extract raw ore.

It was a brutal, grueling existence, but it secretly built the foundation of a World Champion. Grasping jagged rocks, tearing at roots, and hauling heavy, unbalanced loads day after day naturally developed a level of tendon density and crushing grip strength that no barbell or dumbbell could ever replicate. 

Baatarkhuu explained:

“There are two reasons that I developed this grip strength. When I was 17, I worked in the mines. Copper, iron, fluorite, and other minerals, I mined with my bare hands. We had no machines at the time. That job was quite hard. I really worked hard. 

“A year after that, I also worked in the mountains. We cut the trees down with our hands as well. That was really, really hard labor. We had no good tools, and it was quite cold outside. But I still had to work. These two jobs gave me great upper body and arm strength.”

The sheer mechanical force required to chop down timber with inadequate hand tools – absorbing the reverberating shock of every single strike – thickened his wrists, forearms, and shoulders.

It was an involuntary masterclass in isometric and concentric power development that built the physique he is known for today.

Unbeknownst to him at the time, every swing of the axe and every rock pulled from the earth was a deposit into an athletic arsenal that would one day rule the world’s largest martial arts organization.

The 12-Hour Shifts And The Frozen Steppes

Physical strength alone does not crown a World Champion. It must be coupled with an unbreakable mental fortitude. Baatarkhuu’s legendary stamina and sheer force of will were cultivated through a daily routine that would break the spirit of an ordinary man.

Working exhaustive 12-hour shifts of manual labor in the mines was merely the prerequisite for his actual passion. When his grueling workday finally ended, Baatarkhuu’s training had just begun.

“The Tormentor” recalled:

“While I was working in the mines in 12-hour shifts, even if I worked for long hours, I still trained so hard. My training was even harder than those mining shifts. When I stopped working in the mines, that gave me more time to train. 

“So, I started training twice a day after that, got some good rest, and worked really hard again. That was the turning point in my career. I truly became a professional athlete.”

Yet even as a full-time professional, Baatarkhuu never abandoned the extreme environments of his homeland.

Mongolia’s unforgiving climate is famously brutal, with winter temperatures plunging to lethal depths. Rather than hiding from the bitter cold in a climate-controlled gym, the bantamweight MMA king actively uses the frozen steppes to harden his mind and body. 

His conditioning routine sounds less like a modern athletic program and more like a mythical warrior’s rite of passage. This daily exposure to absolute physical extremes is what he believes granted him the superhuman strength he has been able to showcase to the world.

Baatarkhuu said:

“I have a few special workouts and training [routines] that I like to do, but it’s not something special. It’s pretty common among Mongolian people. But it is very hard for other people. 

“We train in the mountains, wrestling in the cold with just our training gear. We live in these extreme temperatures, rubbing snow on our bodies. When it’s minus 40 Celsius outside and there are parts of the lake or the river that have not frozen over, we take a bath there. It’s quite common in our country. I’m also one of those crazy guys who love to do that.”

An Unbreakable Hold On The Bantamweight MMA Throne

Today, the man who once mined copper with his bare hands stands alone at the summit of the martial arts world. 

His journey from the brutal mines of rural Mongolia to the global stage of ONE Championship is a testament to the fact that some fighters are simply built different. Baatarkhuu’s power is not a product of lifting weights. It is the physical manifestation of a lifetime spent conquering immovable objects.

Currently, the ONE Bantamweight MMA World Champion is awaiting his next assignment. While an official fight has not been booked yet, fans are eagerly anticipating his first World Title defense.

The division is teeming with world-class grapplers, elite strikers, and hungry contenders desperate to claim the 26 pounds of gold.

But whoever steps into the Circle with Baatarkhuu next will have to solve an impossible physical puzzle.

They will not just be fighting a mixed martial artist. They will be fighting a man whose hands were hardened by the mountains, whose lungs were strengthened by the freezing steppes, and whose iron grip refuses to let go.

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