‘It’s A Completely Different World Out There’ – Kade Ruotolo On The Fishing Passion That Has Always Anchored Him
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.”
