Alistair Overeem's decision to leave the Golden Glory Training Camp in September came as a relative surprise given the tenure of the relationship and fittingly capped a festering rift between the two sides. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement Overeem stayed mum on most of the details, only acknowledging that there was a "breach of trust" that led to the fracture.
Now, a few months removed from the ordeal, Overeem revealed a larger portion of the story in the seventh episode of the online documentary "The Reem".
Much of heavyweight champion's account details an alleged betrayal by longtime manager Bas Boon that eventually led him to the Xtreme Couture training facility. Per Overeem:
As of a month ago, I quit with Golden Glory. This is due to approximately a year-and-a-half, two years of small dissatisfactory points.
Any relationship you have, you have issues and you work on them. Especially I've been with Golden Glory for 11 years. There has been issues in the past, sometimes small, sometimes big. And overall we always work them out. But during the contract negotiations with the UFC something happened -- and I'm not going to go into details because then the story is going to become a little too complicated -- something happened that I found out by myself, that was kept secret to me.
Bas Boon, currently living in Thailand was doing all the communication with the UFC, and Bas Boon was not able to join me to sign a contract. And basically, a lot of communications were done by e-mail and over the phone. I spoke to him every day about what was going on with the contract negotiations.
Because Bas wasn't there, I hired a lawyer to go through the contract with me step-by-step. What the lawyer found out was there were details in the contract that were to my disadvantage, and that were [of] advantage to Golden Glory, which were also not explained to me by Golden Glory, and particularly by Bas.
I think it's the management's duty to explain stuff to a fighter. That's what they're there for... and they were not doing their job. Not only that, it was such a big disadvantage that it also caused a breach in trust... For me they're a harmful match.