Kade Ruotolo’s MMA schooling just jumped a few grades. The ONE Championship submission grappling champion will face former ONE lightweight titleholder Ok Rae Yoon on Dec. 18 at ONE Fight Night 50 in Bangkok, Thailand, MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz reported Monday. Cruz also flagged the booking on X. According to the promotion, the card will air in U.S. primetime.
This is the biggest name Ruotolo has seen inside a cage, and it isn’t particularly close. He’s 4-0 in MMA, all four fights in ONE, all four finished. The first three ended in tapouts, which surprised exactly nobody who has watched him grapple. The fourth is the one that got my attention: he stopped Hiroyuki Tetsuka with a second-round knockout in his most recent outing. A jiu-jitsu champion who adds a knockout to his résumé gives opponents one more thing to worry about besides his hips and hands.
Ruotolo is 23 and still holds the ONE submission grappling belt, though his focus lately has clearly shifted toward MMA. Four fights in, ONE is now matching him against someone with real hardware.
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Yoon’s résumé, and his slide
Yoon, the South Korean veteran, has 17 wins across 24 professional MMA bouts. His 2021 was the kind of year people build careers on. He beat Eddie Alvarez, then beat Christian Lee to capture the ONE lightweight title. Those are two of the more recognizable wins anyone on ONE’s roster can claim.
The recent stretch is rougher. Yoon dropped decisions in his last two MMA fights, to Alibeg Rasulov and Lucas Gabriel. So he arrives in Bangkok a former champion on a two-fight skid, and those losses went the distance rather than ending early. That’s a detail I’d keep in mind. Losing on the cards to good fighters is a different problem than getting finished, and a guy who keeps hearing the final horn is a guy who has been hard to put away.
For Ruotolo, that is the whole assignment. His four opponents so far haven’t made it to a scorecard. Yoon has been to plenty of them, including two of the most important nights of his career against Alvarez and Lee.
Quick take
This is the correct fight at the correct time, and credit to ONE for not padding the record further. Ruotolo needs a former champion who has seen elite opposition and won’t panic the first time a leg gets attacked or the back gets taken. Yoon also gets something real out of it: beat the most famous grappler on the roster and two straight decision losses stop mattering. I still like Ruotolo, and I like him to finish it. The Tetsuka knockout tells me he’s comfortable enough on the feet to force the exchanges that set up his entries, and once this goes to the mat I have a hard time seeing a path where Yoon spends three or five rounds there safely. Ruotolo by submission, probably after a takedown off a striking exchange, sometime before the judges get involved on Dec. 18.
