Tag: Royce Gracie

Royce Gracie Plain Wrong in His Criticism of Own Family


(We never expected The Godfather of MMA to take sides against the family like this. | Photo by Sherdog.com)

By Elias Cepeda

On Monday I wrote about practitioners of “real” Jiu Jitsu. That is, those who have a background in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and who test those skills in real fights.

Kron Gracie looks to be the next such high-profile example as he sets his sights on a 2014 MMA debut. Royce Gracie is, of course, the first that most of us ever heard of.

Gracie entered the original UFC tournaments as the lightest fighter in open weight contests where the only rules were no biting, eye gouging or fish-hooking, and submitted three and four men in single-night tournaments with the Jiu Jitsu skills that his family developed. As such, Royce’s place in history is more than secure.

As younger family members of his try to carve out their own space in MMA, however, Royce is offering not support but rather rough criticism. Many have criticized fighters like Roger and Rolles Gracie for not being as well-rounded as a few of their best opponents, and take the occasions of their losses to pile on.

Surprisingly, Royce is the latest critic to add some fertilizer onto that pile. Unlike many others, however, Royce says that the reason for his family members’ recent losses is because they are trying to be too well-rounded.

“Jiu-jitsu is enough,” Royce Gracie recently told MMAFighting.com. “I’ve trained boxing in the past to learn the distance, trained wrestling to understand how he would take me down, but I won’t get there to fight my opponent’s game. The [new] guys [from the Gracie] family want to complement their game, like if Jiu-Jitsu was incomplete. I guess they forgot a little about history.

“I do jiu-jitsu my whole life, so why would I try to stand and bang with Mike Tyson?” he went on. “I’m going to learn boxing in six months because my opponent is good in boxing? That makes no sense.”


(We never expected The Godfather of MMA to take sides against the family like this. | Photo by Sherdog.com)

By Elias Cepeda

On Monday I wrote about practitioners of “real” Jiu Jitsu. That is, those who have a background in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and who test those skills in real fights.

Kron Gracie looks to be the next such high-profile example as he sets his sights on a 2014 MMA debut. Royce Gracie is, of course, the first that most of us ever heard of.

Gracie entered the original UFC tournaments as the lightest fighter in open weight contests where the only rules were no biting, eye gouging or fish-hooking, and submitted three and four men in single-night tournaments with the Jiu Jitsu skills that his family developed. As such, Royce’s place in history is more than secure.

As younger family members of his try to carve out their own space in MMA, however, Royce is offering not support but rather rough criticism. Many have criticized fighters like Roger and Rolles Gracie for not being as well-rounded as a few of their best opponents, and take the occasions of their losses to pile on.

Surprisingly, Royce is the latest critic to add some fertilizer onto that pile. Unlike many others, however, Royce says that the reason for his family members’ recent losses is because they are trying to be too well-rounded.

“Jiu-jitsu is enough,” Royce Gracie recently told MMAFighting.com. “I’ve trained boxing in the past to learn the distance, trained wrestling to understand how he would take me down, but I won’t get there to fight my opponent’s game. The [new] guys [from the Gracie] family want to complement their game, like if Jiu-Jitsu was incomplete. I guess they forgot a little about history.

“I do jiu-jitsu my whole life, so why would I try to stand and bang with Mike Tyson?” he went on. ”I’m going to learn boxing in six months because my opponent is good in boxing? That makes no sense.”

I suppose the “history” Royce speaks of is his own, where he was able to dominate many opponents because they had never trained Jiu Jitsu before. Once they did, competition started to level-off and he and everyone else started having more trouble with one another in the ring and cage.

Why Royce is choosing to make self-aggrandizing criticisms of family members who are still physically sore from recent losses is beyond my understanding. It is safe to assume, however, that Royce has no real first-hand knowledge of the type of training and development of cousins like Roger and Rolles, who have trained under the leadership of perhaps the most MMA-accomplished Gracie, Renzo.

That aside, let’s focus on the thrust of what Royce seems to be saying. He’s assuming that his cousins are distracted by the training of too many other things other than “pure” Jiu Jitsu. Things like wrestling (ie. getting the fight to the ground) and striking (ie. not getting knocked out on the feet while you’re there).

To me, Jiu Jitsu has always been more of a philosophy than any particular set of moves or even focus of a portion of fighting (ie. grappling or submissions or ground fighting). That is to say, what makes Brazilian Jiu Jitsu unique is that it always recognized that anything – strikes, clinching, take downs, submissions, ground work – can and usually does happen in a fight. With that understanding, a true Jiu Jitsu practitioner proceeds along a path that he or she believes will best prepare them for anything.

They will ignore no possibility of danger and so will prepare for everything. As Bruce Lee was fond of saying, real fighting is about honestly assessing – through fighting – what works and what doesn’t. If something works, use it. If it doesn’t, don’t.

Something that works well for a great BJJ practitioner is being able to get on top of their opponent where they can better control and finish them. Royce knows this. He did it plenty of times.

When he could, he took down his opponents. When he could not, he worked off of his own back.

That doesn’t seem very different at all than what we have seen guys like Roger and Rolles do in their fights, mostly successfully but sometimes not. But we’ve also seen examples of Jiu Jitsu guys having lapses of judgment in fights and paying for it. Think of Demian Maia trying to throw a high kick against Nate Marquardt, or Vitor Belfort letting Randy Couture walk him backwards into the cage and initiate the grappling. I can’t remember any Gracies making similar mistakes.

So, if we see Gracies try to fight conservatively and to their strengths in competition as Royce always did, what exactly is Royce’s beef? The fact that Roger and Rolles spend time working on their weaknesses in training, evidently. This is where Royce is just flat out wrong.

Back when no one else in MMA trained the indispensable style of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu except for Royce and his family, he could get away with the basic strike-blocking and poor take downs to go along with his excellent durability and Jiu Jitsu skills. Jiu Jitsu fighters these days are faced with an entirely different world – one where everyone trains high-level Jiu Jitsu and uses it along with their own wrestling or striking bases.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu provided the first martial arts style to recognize that grappling and striking could occur along with ground fighting, but that doesn’t mean that BJJ takedowns or strikes are the most effective when facing a good wrestler or striker, all other things being equal. And that’s a big part of it – the submission grappling part of fights is very often equal, even between Gracies and non-Gracie opponents.

The Gracie name isn’t magic. If you train Jiu Jitsu with a real instructor for years, you will get good at it, no matter what your name is. Rolles and Roger fight guys who are very good at Jiu Jitsu, as well as other things, like wrestling and striking.

The fact that they train like professional fighters and not mid-twentieth century part-time martial arts instructors is not something to be criticized. Royce saying that Gracies can neutralize modern striking and wrestling without training striking and wrestling is just about as absurd as the Akido or Tae Kwon Do instructor who says that you don’t need to train grappling because their kicks and punches and footwork will prevent anyone from ever grabbing them.

Yeah, right.

Working on weaknesses is a hallmark of champions. Royce knows this. Maybe it is just hard to admit in public.

If he had better striking, perhaps he would not have gotten beaten up for an hour and a half by Kazushi Sakuraba’s leg kicks before having to throw in the towel. Chances are, however, that Rolles Gracies would not have avoided getting knocked out last Saturday night if he had spent less time working on his boxing in training.

“I believe in pure jiu-jitsu. That’s what I’ve done in the past. You have to go back to your roots and train Gracie jiu-jitsu,” Royce went on to say in his interview.

I couldn’t agree more. The thing is, to me Gracie Jiu Jitsu is about never staying stagnant, constantly evolving and constantly improving to be able to meet new fight challenges.

Royce met the challenges of his day bravely. It would be great if he didn’t now try to sully the efforts of his younger family members who are trying to meet the challenges of their day with bravery, but also with a bit more technique.

On Rank, Resumes, and Arm Bars — The Simple Reason Why Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Still Matters in MMA


(The Gracies proved that BJJ is indispensable — not that it’s invincible. / Photo via Getty)

By Elias Cepeda

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in mixed martial arts has been on my mind a bit more than usual lately. A few weeks ago Benson Henderson walked to the ring wearing a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gi with his brand new black belt tied around it at the waist.

Minutes later he walked out, his black belt still in tow but without his UFC lightweight title belt after getting submitted by an arm bar from inside the full guard of Anthony Pettis. At the time, Pettis was ranked as a blue belt — the belt just above white in BJJ.

Not many weeks prior to that, Roger Gracie, the most dominant submission grappling competitor in decades, lost his UFC debut and then was promptly dropped from the organization. This past Saturday, Roger’s cousin Rolles – son of legendary Rolls Gracie – got knocked out in the second round of his WSOF 5 fight with Derrick Mehmen in tragically comic fashion.

Rolles got hit, the punch put him out on his feet and he spun around slowly before falling to the ground. It looked like the slapstick “Flair Flop” move that pro wrestler Ric Flair used to pull off after getting hit to put over his opponent. Three and a half years ago, of course, Rolles humiliated himself against Joey Beltran in his lone UFC fight after appearing to exhaust himself almost immediately.

Both recent Gracie losses brought about public questions of whether or not the Gracie family and Jiu Jitsu itself have become outdated in modern MMA. Henderson’s submission loss to Pettis could have been seen as a triumph of Jiu Jitsu technique but instead, some critics chose to question the validity and use of BJJ belt ranks.

What did Henderson’s black belt mean, exactly, if he could go out and get submitted by someone with a lower BJJ rank, who was more known for high-flying kicks than anything, and with such a basic move? The notions that Gracies losing fights and Henderson getting submitted somehow reflect negatively on Jiu Jitsu itself are, of course, silly.

MMA isn’t about magical styles and secrets solely in the possession of those with certain-colored pieces of clothing or particular surnames. It never has been.


(The Gracies proved that BJJ is indispensable — not that it’s invincible. / Photo via Getty)

By Elias Cepeda

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in mixed martial arts has been on my mind a bit more than usual lately. A few weeks ago Benson Henderson walked to the ring wearing a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gi with his brand new black belt tied around it at the waist.

Minutes later he walked out, his black belt still in tow but without his UFC lightweight title belt after getting submitted by an arm bar from inside the full guard of Anthony Pettis. At the time, Pettis was ranked as a blue belt — the belt just above white in BJJ.

Not many weeks prior to that, Roger Gracie, the most dominant submission grappling competitor in decades, lost his UFC debut and then was promptly dropped from the organization. This past Saturday, Roger’s cousin Rolles – son of legendary Rolls Gracie – got knocked out in the second round of his WSOF 5 fight with Derrick Mehmen in tragically comic fashion.

Rolles got hit, the punch put him out on his feet and he spun around slowly before falling to the ground. It looked like the slapstick “Flair Flop” move that pro wrestler Ric Flair used to pull off after getting hit to put over his opponent. Three and a half years ago, of course, Rolles humiliated himself against Joey Beltran in his lone UFC fight after appearing to exhaust himself almost immediately.

Both recent Gracie losses brought about public questions of whether or not the Gracie family and Jiu Jitsu itself have become outdated in modern MMA. Henderson’s submission loss to Pettis could have been seen as a triumph of Jiu Jitsu technique but instead, some critics chose to question the validity and use of BJJ belt ranks.

What did Henderson’s black belt mean, exactly, if he could go out and get submitted by someone with a lower BJJ rank, who was more known for high-flying kicks than anything, and with such a basic move? The notions that Gracies losing fights and Henderson getting submitted somehow reflect negatively on Jiu Jitsu itself are, of course, silly.

MMA isn’t about magical styles and secrets solely in the possession of those with certain-colored pieces of clothing or particular surnames. It never has been.

Royce Gracie won the early UFC’s because of his Jiu Jitsu style, true. His style, Gracie Jiu Jitsu, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu won him his bouts, but not because it was mystical. Quite the opposite, actually.

Jiu Jitsu succeeded simply because it a) calls for real, hard sparring with resistance every day, b) because it was the only style to at least recognize that anything can happen in a fight, and c) because Gracie was the only guy who was practicing Jiu Jitsu in the UFC at the time.

Gracie may have been the smallest and weakest guy in the early UFC tournaments but he was the only one who trained each day against resisting opponents and was ready for people to punch, kick, grab, head butt, and pull hair. So, the most prepared guy won those early UFC’s.

In modern MMA, it’s largely the same thing. The most prepared, well-rounded and conditioned man or woman usually wins.

In that way, not as much has changed since those early days of MMA. The conventional wisdom about what the early UFC’s proved about Gracie Jiu Jitsu is wrong.

Royce Gracie and UFC’s 1-4 did not prove that Jiu Jitsu is dominant but rather that it is indispensable. You could have ancient secrets from Chinese monasteries and do one-finger push ups but you’d better be experienced in real combat.

You could be a game, hard-hitting boxer with great sense of distance and timing but you’d better be ready for someone to grab you and no ref there to save you by breaking up the clinch. You could be an outrageously strong and conditioned wrestler, used to working on the mat and man-handling opponents, but you’d better recognize that in the real world it isn’t illegal for your opponent to choke you or twist on that shoulder lock until you say uncle.

Many fight-styles and disciplines existed for ages but the introduction of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to the world is what made Mixed Martial Arts. Royce Gracie showed that you needed to train BJJ to be successful in real fighting.

That’s still true to this day. Every amateur and professional MMA fighter trains Brazilian Jiu Jitsu whether they call it that or catch fighting or submission grappling or what have you.

Proving BJJ necessary in real fighting is the long-ago established success of the Gracie family, much more so than any particular win by Royce or anyone else in their clan.

As for Henderson losing to Pettis, one guy was better that night than the other. That’s it.

Henderson, black belt or not, decided to let his arm hang out in a dangerous position in Pettis’ guard for no apparent reason other than his supreme confidence in his own slipperiness, and he paid for it.

Fighters make mistakes and, sometimes, their opponents make them pay for it.

No one questions whether a boxer who has spent his entire life training is a “real” boxer or whether or not boxing is useful for fighting when he gets hit with a straight right – a “basic” punch. More often than not, it is only the basics – executed with impeccable timing, that work in real fights.

And, only real fights show who is, in fact, better and should be ranked higher. A Jiu Jitsu belt, given to a hard working and accomplished student from a reputable and credible instructor can be a very meaningful and representative thing. But, in the words of Royce, the only thing a belt will do for you when push comes to shove is hold your pants up.

Getting submitted in and of itself doesn’t mean that Henderson shouldn’t feel proud of his black belt. However, submitting Henderson should definitely make Pettis damn proud of his blue belt.

As for Roger and Rolles, they also just lost to better fighters. That’s it.

Roger is no disappointment. In Tim Kennedy, he came up against a better, far more experienced and well-rounded fighter who, like all MMA fighters, has been studying Gracie’s family style for years. Overall, Roger has a solid 6-2 record in three weight classes, and has beaten former world champs and UFC and Pride veterans like Kevin Randleman, Yuki Kondo, Trevor Prangley and Keith Jardine.

Rolles is 8-2 in his MMA career in a number of different international organizations and all of his wins were by submission. Of course, Rolles and Roger face increased scrutiny because of their last names and because they are so accomplished in submission grappling competition.

Both Roger and Rolles are wizards in Jiu Jitsu competitions but probably will never become champions in MMA. “See?” one can hear sour critics of Jiu Jitsu taunt. “Winning world titles in submission grappling doesn’t make you the best fighter in the world anymore.”

Of course it doesn’t. The thing is, winning submission grappling world titles doesn’t make them the best BJJ practitioners or representatives, either. These guys are not the best BJJ practitioners any more than great boxers or kick boxers are the best strikers.
The best striker is a fighter who can land those same punches and kicks against people who are not just trying to hit them but also take them down, choke them, etc.

As such, the best grapplers, then, are the ones who do it effectively in MMA – not just win gold at Jiu Jitsu tournaments. There are plenty of examples of that in MMA.

Rolles and Roger have grappled since they were children and accomplished much in the submission grappling world. They don’t deserve derision for not being perfect in MMA, they deserve some respect for being brave enough to fight guys who have been fighting in the sport for much longer.

That said, the current and next generation of MMA champions are all fighters who have trained Jiu Jitsu and just about everything else since they were kids and haven’t wasted too much of their youth and abilities in contests where strikes, slams, etc. are not allowed. On that note, the son of perhaps Jiu Jitsu’s best practitioner ever recently announced plans to make his MMA debut within the year.

Kron Gracie, the youngest son of Rickson Gracie, told Tatame magazine that he’ll fight MMA in 2014. The twenty five year-old has medaled at the ADCC submission grappling world championships but has yet to win a world title since becoming a black belt.
Kron does have an attitude and approach to Jiu Jitsu that should suit him well for MMA. He’s also young enough to make the transition, and has been doing MMA sparring with some of the best fighters in the world for some time now.

Kron is close with Nate and Nick Diaz and has worked with them extensively, as well as their teammates Jake Shields and Gilbert Melendez. When I spoke with Kron last May as he prepared to compete in the submission grappling event Metamoris II, his mind was already on MMA.

He was with Nate as he spoke to me about “real” Jiu Jitsu. “Jiu Jitsu is about what works in fighting,” he told me as he explained why, even in submission grappling matches, he never goes for the types of fancy, esoteric moves that so many other Jiu Jitsu competitors favor these days.

Kron told Tatame about fighting in MMA, “It’s a truer fight, there’s no guard… It’s you and another man going to war. It’s truer than jiu-jitsu.”

Here’s what separates guys like Kron, or BJ Penn or Demian Maia from other Jiu Jitsu-based athletes. Since BJJ began to be a big-money pursuit, medal stands have become stacked with great athletes who have dozens of world titles but have never thrown or taken a punch.

They claim that submission grappling tournaments showcase more elegant, technical displays than the stuff we see work in MMA fights. That BJJ matches are somehow more pure demonstrations of Jiu Jitsu.

They’ve got it all wrong. Before there were a million different grappling organizations — all with their claim to being “world championships,” and each with their own volumes of rules and all the moves that are not allowed — Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was developed and used in the real world, in real fights.

Kron Gracie, Penn, Maia and the like all went the submission grappling international tournament route for a time, sure. They’re fun, you can make some money if you’re good, and it’s excellent training.

Ultimately, however, they craved something more. They craved what Jiu Jitsu was developed for – the fight.

Submission grapplers are often referred to as Jiu Jitsu “players,” as if they played basketball or baseball or some other entertaining but ultimately useless sport. Before there were ever Jiu Jitsu players, however, there were only Jiu Jitsu fighters.

Some of them remain. Some, like Kron and his father and grandfather before him, know that if they train Jiu Jitsu, their destiny is to fight in the sport that Jiu Jitsu created.

Great Dana White Vlog or Greatest Dana White Vlog?

UFC 162 takes place this Saturday in Las Vegas and organization President Dana White has released his first video blog of the week leading up to the event. It’s pretty good.

In it, UFC Hall of Fame fighter Chuck Liddell teaches TUF finalist Uriah Hall how to set up his deadly over hand right punch, as well as wrestles around with Mike Tyson and Royce Gracie. Liddell protege Glover Teixeira gets to meet Tyson, a hero of his and Uncle Dana personally makes the streets of Vegas safer.

Enjoy the vlog in between charred meat sessions today, all you American taters. For our Canadian friends – enjoy work, suckers!

Crap. I guess I’m working today too…and without that whole socialized health care benefit to boot.

Still, ‘Merica!

UFC 162 takes place this Saturday in Las Vegas and organization President Dana White has released his first video blog of the week leading up to the event. It’s pretty good.

In it, UFC Hall of Fame fighter Chuck Liddell teaches TUF finalist Uriah Hall how to set up his deadly over hand right punch, as well as wrestles around with Mike Tyson and Royce Gracie. Liddell protege Glover Teixeira gets to meet Tyson, a hero of his and Uncle Dana personally makes the streets of Vegas safer.

Enjoy the vlog in between charred meat sessions today, all you American taters. For our Canadian friends – enjoy work, suckers!

Crap. I guess I’m working today too…and without that whole socialized health care benefit to boot.

Still, ‘Merica!

– Elias Cepeda

MMA Bracketology: Re-Imagining the UFC 2, UFC 3, And UFC 6 Tournaments


(And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why history must be re-written.)

By Matt Saccaro

Tournaments seem like a great way to determine the best competitor from a group of athletes. You have 8 (or 16 or 32 or whatever the number) fighters, put them in a bracket, and then let them fight it out. The last dude standing clearly must be the best because he survived the tournament, right?

At first, that logic seems OK. But upon closer scrutiny, it starts to sound like something Master Shake would try to argue.

Tournaments — like the ones the UFC used to run — are heavily dependent on how the bracket is organized. Some fighters get an easy run, others get a gauntlet.

This got us at Cage Potato thinking: What if some of the early UFC tournament brackets were re-organized or even shuffled just a little bit? Who would end up becoming the “Ultimate Fighters” of the 1990s? Let’s find out!

UFC 2

UFC 2 was the first and only 16-man tournament run by the UFC. The first round of the tournament — save for Royce Gracie’s fight (of course)—didn’t air on the PPV and aren’t on the DVD either.  These “lost fights” from UFC 2 have quite a few interesting characters such as the enigmatic Pencak Silat master Alberto Cerro Leon and the chubby, sweatpants-clad Robert Lucarelli.

Look at the complete bracket and see how many names you recognize. Most of these guys from the UFC 2 dark matches had no chance in the tournament, save for a man named Freek (or Frank) Hamaker.  We’re going to stick with Freek because it rhymes with Reek. A fighter like Hamaker was a rarity in the early days. He wasn’t a hapless striker fated to be embarrassed.  He was a sambo practitioner who trained under legendary European grappler Chris Dolman.

Hamaker’s first (and only) fight was at UFC 2 against the mysterious San Soo Kung Fu man Thaddeus Luster. The fight went like the typical early UFC fight. The guy with grappling immediately took down the guy without grappling and won shortly afterwards. Hamaker withdrew from the tournament after defeating Luster and disappeared to the pornography theater from whence he came.


(And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why history must be re-written.)

By Matt Saccaro

Tournaments seem like a great way to determine the best competitor from a group of athletes. You have 8 (or 16 or 32 or whatever the number) fighters, put them in a bracket, and then let them fight it out. The last dude standing clearly must be the best because he survived the tournament, right?

At first, that logic seems OK. But upon closer scrutiny, it starts to sound like something Master Shake would try to argue.

Tournaments — like the ones the UFC used to run — are heavily dependent on how the bracket is organized. Some fighters get an easy run, others get a gauntlet.

This got us at Cage Potato thinking: What if some of the early UFC tournament brackets were re-organized or even shuffled just a little bit? Who would end up becoming the “Ultimate Fighters” of the 1990s? Let’s find out!

UFC 2

UFC 2 was the first and only 16-man tournament run by the UFC. The first round of the tournament — save for Royce Gracie’s fight (of course)—didn’t air on the PPV and aren’t on the DVD either.  These “lost fights” from UFC 2 have quite a few interesting characters such as the enigmatic Pencak Silat master Alberto Cerro Leon and the chubby, sweatpants-clad Robert Lucarelli.

Look at the complete bracket and see how many names you recognize. Most of these guys from the UFC 2 dark matches had no chance in the tournament, save for a man named Freek (or Frank) Hamaker.  We’re going to stick with Freek because it rhymes with Reek. A fighter like Hamaker was a rarity in the early days. He wasn’t a hapless striker fated to be embarrassed.  He was a sambo practitioner who trained under legendary European grappler Chris Dolman.

Hamaker’s first (and only) fight was at UFC 2 against the mysterious San Soo Kung Fu man Thaddeus Luster. The fight went like the typical early UFC fight. The guy with grappling immediately took down the guy without grappling and won shortly afterwards. Hamaker withdrew from the tournament after defeating Luster and disappeared to the pornography theater from whence he came.

Hamaker had tremendous potential given his background in an effective martial art and given that having any kind of grappling ability in the early UFCs was tantamount to bringing a taser into the cage with you.

We don’t need to re-imagine the UFC 2 bracket much to have a more interesting outcome.

Let’s just pretend that Hamaker never got injured and consequently never withdrew.

After defeating Luster, he’d take on kickboxer Johnny Rhodes. Judging by the fact that Patrick Smith submitted Rhodes in a little over a minute, a more qualified grappler in Hamaker probably wouldn’t need much more time to do the same.

That would bring Hamaker into the semifinals against Pat Smith, who was previously submitted by Ken Shamrock at UFC 1 in short order, and was destroyed in the UFC 2 finals by Royce Gracie. Smith may have had enough grappling to beat the Ray Wizards and Rudyard Moncayos of the world but he likely wouldn’t have enough submission acumen to beat Hamaker. So in CagePotato’s alternate reality version of events, The “Freak” — that wasn’t his nickname, but it should’ve been. Freek “The Freak” Hamaker? You don’t like it? Fine. — therefore gets his hand raised for third time that night.

Could Hamaker really have taken out Royce Gracie in the finals?

Probably not, but keep in mind that Gracie initially struggled against Keith Hackney at UFC 5, a karate guy who had added just a smattering of BJJ into his arsenal. So, Gracie still would probably have won UFC 2 but he would’ve looked mortal doing it — and that’s the important thing.

At UFC 1, Royce Gracie looked like an unstoppable killer; maybe not a Che Mills-level killer, but a killer nonetheless. He took martial arts “experts” down and submitted them without breaking a sweat. Gracie did much of the same at UFC 2.

It’s unlikely that Hamaker would’ve beaten Gracie (pre-drug-testing Ken Shamrock lost to Gracie the first time and the skilled Judoka Remco Pardoel also lost to Gracie as well), but he had a good chance of at least making Gracie look like a regular, fallible fighter.

A Hamaker-Gracie finale would’ve shown the world that BJJ (or, more specifically “Gracie” Jiu-Jitsu) wasn’t a martial arts panacea and that Royce Gracie wasn’t some kind of god. It took Jesus-freak, motivational speaker, and meth enthusiast Kimo Leopoldo to do that.

Speaking of Kimo…

“There’s No Points on the Street”: Royce Gracie Talks BJJ, Exit From Fighting + More [VIDEO]

(Props: YouTube.com/CagePotato)

In this chat with CagePotato.com reporter Elias Cepeda at the Metamoris 2 pro jiu-jitsu invitational, UFC godfather Royce Gracie gives us his thoughts on modern BJJ — he prefers the old-school basics, big surprise — and tells us how he’s been spending his days now that his MMA life is officially behind him. And believe us, it’s behind him:

“You gotta know when to stop. It’s not an easy business to be in. I’m just teaching and enjoying life [now]. I’m 46 years old, been there, done that, fought everybody. There’s always gonna be a new guy that [says] ‘Hey, can we fight?’ Nahhh. Been there, done that.”

Follow Royce on Twitter @RealRoyce, and subscribe to our channel for more good stuff.

Previously — Backstage Interview: Renato Laranja, The Unofficial Rabbi of Metamoris 2 [VIDEO]


(Props: YouTube.com/CagePotato)

In this chat with CagePotato.com reporter Elias Cepeda at the Metamoris 2 pro jiu-jitsu invitational, UFC godfather Royce Gracie gives us his thoughts on modern BJJ — he prefers the old-school basics, big surprise — and tells us how he’s been spending his days now that his MMA life is officially behind him. And believe us, it’s behind him:

“You gotta know when to stop. It’s not an easy business to be in. I’m just teaching and enjoying life [now]. I’m 46 years old, been there, done that, fought everybody. There’s always gonna be a new guy that [says] ‘Hey, can we fight?’ Nahhh. Been there, done that.”

Follow Royce on Twitter @RealRoyce, and subscribe to our channel for more good stuff.

Previously — Backstage Interview: Renato Laranja, The Unofficial Rabbi of Metamoris 2 [VIDEO]

4 Reasons the UFC Needs Criteria for Induction to the UFC Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame: The mere words elicit images of grandstanding champions dominating their respective sports.Through any and all means, each athlete worthy of such honorable mention must have broken records in a manner iconic of his or her sport. Definitiv…

Hall of Fame: The mere words elicit images of grandstanding champions dominating their respective sports.

Through any and all means, each athlete worthy of such honorable mention must have broken records in a manner iconic of his or her sport. Definitive and declarative, entry into this upper echelon ought to be beyond argument.

Or so it should be.

Yet the UFC Hall of Fame is often discussed for all the wrong reasons. Debates and disagreements are sparked when certain UFC veterans are mentioned—in some cases the concern is over those who have not received their just recognition, whereas in others, the commotion revolves around names that have received far too much of it.

What specific accomplishments does a fighter need to gain entry? Championships in multiple weight classes? An undisclosed number of consecutive victories? Philanthropic efforts to promote the sport both inside the cage and out of it?

It’s unlikely that we’ll pacify all involved by continuing to induct fighters without an open standard. On the contrary, the UFC brass need to outline a firm set of criteria for induction into the Hall of Fame. 

There are plenty of reasons that could make the list, but let’s examine the most crucial ones.

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