He wasn’t promoting a fight when he said those things.
Rickson was straight delusional when it came to mma once it evolved .. I’m not surprised Kron was so backwards when he entered the ufc .
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Rickson trashed a bunch of fighters he knew he had no intention of fighting…. Including Ruas and Bas.
The legend of Bruce is different because he never fought professionally or publicly said he would beat up professional fighters.
Rickson did that on numerous occasions and not only talked trash but made it sound like these guys winning world championships and tournaments didn’t even know how to fight, and he’d make them look stupid. Meanwhile Rickson is inviting god knows who to his gym racking up “wins” so he can say he’s undefeated.
He looked very legit in the fights he did have and was obviously the best BJJ guy in the world at the time, but there is nothing I saw in those fights that indicated he had the skills to beat a guy like Sakuraba. I think Saku would have been the rightful favorite. I still have no idea how that fight would go and it’s obviously a fantasy but I would favor Saku.
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I don’t even see Hickson as any kind of legend, or mma legend at all!
Like that guy who kick’s ass in teh Boxercise gym but has never set foot under the spotlight!
He beat Rickson without ever having to step up to him. He was labeled the Gracie hunter. I guess you could claim the money wasn’t right at that point. They even gave the Gracies the ruleset advantage.
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This is what I don’t get. Rickson is not a deep half player. Rickson is a get on top, slowly pass, mount guy. Nothing about his style transitions poorly when you add striking. Everything just gets easier because he can also hit you.
For people who are good at actual BJJ, striking makes grappling easier, not harder.
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Renzo was far and away the most accomplished Gracie of the Sak era and we have the data on how that went
Sakuraba looked bored for most of the flight, waited for position, and theatrically kimura’d Renzo. Renzo was in shape and characteristically game, but Sakuraba was way too slick for him.
Any footage I’ve seen of Rickson fighting nhb he looked extremely cautious. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the opposite of what seemed effective against Sak, which was Axe Murderer Silva style aggression
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He was good at striking once he secured you on the ground. But his stand-up was basic as heck. He would have gotten dismantled by Sak if he tried to trade, and he wasn’t even a good striker in his pre-Chute Boxe days.
I think I heard somewhere that something like 17-20 is the prime hockey playing age.
I don’t know how true it is, of course, but it would help explain your point if so.
I don’t see anything in any prime Sakuraba or Rickson fights that leads me to believe there would have been any trading from either of them.
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I was responding to a comment saying the Gracies Sak beat were smaller worse versions of Rickson.
My comment wasn’t specific to striking from top position. Of course being able to strike from a superior position is a benefit.
There is also striking everywhere in MMA.
Eskimo is just framing it a certain way that I don’t necessarily agree with.
I don’t think Rickson being the best at GJJ makes him “better at MMA” than Gracies who were significantly more accomplished in MMA.
Additionally, I don’t think believing Rickson to beat Renzo in MMA would mean a whole lot, since that “fight” would probably just turn into a GJJ exhibition.
I have a lot of hespect for Rickson.
You should have seen me in the movie theater with my wife when he was in the beginning of that Incredible Hulk movie lol.
I had no idea he was in it.
I was pointing at the screen saying woah check it out that’s Rickson! My wife was probably the only other person in the theater who even halfway understood lol.
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You seem to think mma of 25 years ago was full of great striking, it wasn’t, and especially not with Sakuraba. My perspective on this is simple. This fight would have largely been a grappling match with ground strikes. That’s why I would favor the guy that I believe was a better grappler.
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That would be a relative statement, and really the thought never crossed my mind – at least not in the way you present it.
Sak wasn’t a killer on the feet. But he was an excellent ring general who used dynamic striking effectively.
Rickson approaching with his hands down and chin up would have eventually led to disaster for him IMO. But I’m not saying I think Sak would have caught KO’d Rickson on the feet. That’s pretty unlikely IMO.
Where Sak uses striking effectively is in transitions and off breaks, which we saw him do be the other Gracie’s he fought.
Sak was very busy with striking and often in unexpected ways, and was effective striking out of a clinch.
My perspective is simple too.
In an MMA fight I’m picking the more accomplished MMA fighter who also happened to have great success vs GJJ fighters, in MMA.
If it was a BJJ match I’d pick Rickson.
I don’t know that Rickson is necessarily a better overall grappler than Sak. I think Rickson is better in certain areas than Sak, and that Sak is more well rounded especially from an MMA perspective considering his takedowns and TDD.
As I said before I think if Rickson can get and maintain top position for a significant amount of time that is the most likely place for Sak to be in trouble.
Whereas a more dynamic fight with a lot of transitions and positional activity favors Sak – especially from a judges perspective.
I do think at some point Rickson might get his back, and I would be very curious to see how that played out.
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i think all of us, if we really believed we were well beyond anyone fighting, woulda taken a fight
unless he had some injuries we didnt know of, i think rickson was not 100% sure he would win in the saku era. i believe, if he was convinced he was really a god of mma, he woulda fought someone noteworthy in that era
i believe he was thinking “well, i’d probably win but i might lose. cant tarnish my aura”
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That’s what being game is about, and Saku was as game as they come.
It’s possible that with my strong striking background I could have done all sorts of things in MMA, but until I do it your safer bet is on the person who knows they can do it well because they have done it well.
For me, Saku wins more than half of the time.
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There is no “what if” with Sakuraba. That’s what makes him better than Rickson.
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There’s no doubt he’s considered the better fighter and rightfully so as he did the damn thing for real. This is all just fantasy, hypothetical debate for fun. I really don’t understand why people get emotional about it or personally offended that Rickson didn’t do what they think he should have. I’m sure we’d all be disappointing to others if all of our decisions were publicly scrutinized by people without all the personal details as to why we made those decisions. These discussions are unfortunately dildo magnets where the strongest opinions are almost always from the do nothing crowd.
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What they accomplished, though, they accomplished with GJJ. He also has a better style of grappling for MMA than any of them do, aside from maybe Renzo (who jumped too many guillotines for my taste).
Even if you could hypothetically hypnotize them both and have them not know each other, that fight always ends with either an RNC or ground and pound death and Rickson on top.
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People act like Rickson owed them something he never gave them. He fought.
People say “he should have proved it in the UFC!” They forget that the UFC still sucked. VTJ 94 was not some tiny side show. Steve jennum beat Harold Howard in the finals of the closest UFC to that lol. VTJ 95 had Nakai, who was tiny but really good. He had the way tougher draw than Rickson bracket wise, but that tournament is every bit as strong overall as the closest UFC to it, which had fucking Jon Hess and Andy Anderson in it.
He was retired after that. He came out of retirement for paydays against Takada and one real fight with Funaki. He didn’t duck Sakuraba or anyone else in my opinion, he just chose to stay retired.
And the hating him talking shit about people from the later generations is very selective, I don’t see people still seething that Chuck thinks he’s better than Jon Jones.
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Well said.
This is worthy of repeating and applies to a lot of the threads here – and especially the fighter bashers.
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There are always two groups of people in these conversations. People who have heard the stories of how Rickson completely raped world class black belts from people they trust, and people who think the difference between BJJ and MMA is so vast it doesn’t matter how good he was.
I always think of the time someone asked this as a mail in question on that Inside MMA show, when Renzo and some journalist were guests. Someone asked who the best Gracie in MMA was, and the journalist said Renzo has the most accomplishments and has really shown it against better people. Renzo started laughing and said something like “it’s Rickson, and it’s not even close. If you would see my training sessions with him, you would not dream of saying I am better at fighting than him.”
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