One of the interesting (and somewhat overlooked) storylines heading into last night’s Strikeforce event was how Roger Gracie would fair in his promotional debut against Kevin Randleman. As we noted a few weeks back, in the jiu-jitsu world Gracie is a pretty, pretty, pretty big deal. Despite being 2-0 in MMA, however, Roger hadn’t fought since May, 2008, so if you had Rolles Gracie’s recent ‘dude he looks awful’ UFC debut on stand-by for comparison, you probably weren’t the only one.
All in all, we thought Roger looked pretty damn good en route to his second round, ‘nighty-night’ choke out win over Randleman. The fact that he dominated Randleman on the ground was no surprise, and although Gracie’s boxing isn’t exactly going to leave Anderson Silva shaking, he’s clearly been working on it. In other words,it looks like Strikeforce did a nice job picking up the jiu-jitsu god.
But is Gracie really interested in giving this whole MMA thing a go? Well according to post-fight comments from the heavyweight, the answer is yes (thanks to MMA Junkie for the quotes).
“The more you fight, the more people start looking into you,” Gracie said after the event. “I’ve been very active for many years fighting in jiu jitsu and grappling, and now I’m more into MMA.”…”I’m pretty sure I’ll be fighting (again) soon. I don’t really know exactly when but hopefully the second part of the year. I’ll be fighting more often now.”
For more from Gracie and Scott Coker’s assessment of the fight head here.