Yeah no. Schultz was trying to be respectful when talking about his first ever roll with Rickson, but he admits that he put Rickson in a cradle and held him there for a LONG time while Rickson just waited for Schultz to let it go.
Depending on the position he held him in, from a cradle you can either head but or knee to the ribs someone to fucking death… or knee to the head them to death as I think about it.
Maybe Rickson was just having fun but from the way Schultz described it Rickson was a dead man 100x over.
Schultz tells the story as if Rickson got the better of him but I never understood how.
I don’t want to get too deep into a discussion about it. I guess it depends how you define MMA? Mixing martial artists of various disciplines or people who trained multiple martial arts?
Was Royce an MMA pioneer by beating a load of guys who had no idea about submission grappling? How many mixed martial artists did he fight? Severn was green. Shamrock? Saku? BTW I totally respect Royce.
Was Rickson an MMA pioneer by fighting Rei Zulu a couple times, fighting nobodies in Japan and refusing to fight anyone else despite being called out constantly? I don’t know how true it is but there are people who said Marco Ruas called out Rickson constantly in Rio and Rickson never stepped up. For the record, I wouldn’t want to fight Ruas either.
Renzo fought MMA. He fought guys like Henderson, Taktarov, Mo Smith, Hughes, Penn etc. Mark Coleman even said Renzo respectfully challenged him in person.
I think the high-fruit, vegetarian diet the Gracies follow is an interesting experiment. They seem to do really well for people who consume a shitload of sugar (from all the fruit they eat). I think it goes to show just how bad the standard American diet is when people can thrive on a diet which I personally do not consider species-appropriate.
Of course you need to factor in how healthy other aspects of their lives are - physical activity, vivacity, sleep etc.
Some of you guys are dumb. Let’s draw a venn diagram. First, draw the circle that encompasses jiu jitsu techniques. If you’re retarded, your circle will just be the stuff that Helio Gracie taught and everything else doesn’t count as jiu jitsu. If you have two brain cells to rub together, your circle includes everything that has been discovered since Helio by every practitioner in every gym worldwide. It’s all jiu jitsu. Everything that works that is within the ruleset is jiu jitsu.
Now that you have your circle drawn, overlay the circle that encompasses all freestyle and folk style wrestling techniques. Now do one that contains all judo techniques. Where do these circles overlap? The wrestling and judo have some overlap, but the funny thing is, those overlapping circles are entirely encompassed by jiu jitsu. All wrestling techniques are also jiu jitsu techniques. All judo techniques are also jiu jitsu techniques. And yes, all catch techniques are also jiu jitsu techniques.
Jiu jitsu is all grappling arts and all grappling arts are jiu jitsu, the only differences are the training methodologies, but jiu jitsu’s methodologies are not static. You can train however you want and focus on whatever you want. You can open a jiu jitsu gym that does nothing but freestyle wrestling techniques if you want to.
So to say wrestling is superior to jiu jitsu is like saying armbars are superior to jiu jitsu.
If you had a guy who just studied armbars and nothing else, and then a whole school of training developed around that style, and that’s all they did - just armbars - you could call their style “armbar jitsu” and you could say “my guy does armbar jitsu, not jiu jitsu”. But he’s doing jiu jitsu, armbar jitsu is just a part of the whole art - a specialization.
So Brock was a wrestler - absolutely. But to say he was not doing jiu jitsu is dumb - everything he did was also part of jiu jitsu.
And just like a guy who only does armbar jitsu, you would see the absurdity in saying “Ah. So fighter X was actually a jiu jitsu practitioner and not an armbar jitsu guy?” In a way yes. Armbar jitsu is just a specialization, not a different style altogether.
Brock didn’t defeat jiu jitsu guys by doing techniques that were outside their art. He defeated them by being really good at a certain set of the techniques that are part of the art.
Just like a boxer beating up a kickboxer - he’s not beating them with anything that is foreign to them - he’s winning by being really good at half their game.
My whole point is, you can’t say any grappling style is superior to jiu jitsu, because all grappling is also jiu jitsu, the other styles are just a specialization. If you defeat a jiu jitsu guy with strikes, you beat him with something outside his art. But if you out grapple him in any way, you did nothing more than beat him by being better at one part of the game he plays.
Also, there’s nothing realistic about fighting in a ring MMA style. It’s not a battlefield, there are no weapons, you fight one guy that you are prepared to fight and you know the guys history, you have a ref, you have a corner
You have none of that in a self-defense situation. Multiple attackers, weapons, not ideal terrain, no ref
But honestly for a sport it’s great. My only problem with it is that they start on the knees. Takedowns for such an integral part of wrestling you can’t remove it
Yes but that’s the way it was at the time. We had to go through those times in MMA to learn the knowledge and skills we have now. I’d say he is a huge pioneer of MMA. The martial art world was wayyy different at the time. Were you a fan back then? Rickson Gracie was the biggest name back then to those who truly followed the sport. Royce moreso for the casuals…
Not everyone starts on the knees. Gracie Barra schools start standing. In cases where there is not enough space to start standing, I will never start both kneeling. Either he starts from guard as though a takedown has just occurred, or I will. Since a lot of guys are scared to start from guard, I almost always do, but it’s not because I love it, it’s just by default because starting from the knees is retarded. So I agree with you, starting from the knees is dumb and a lot of guys do it, but it’s not “jiu jitsu” that starts kneeling, it’s just a lot of people.
As legendary as they were at bjj, the gracies were even better promoters. Thats ultimately why they were so successful. The family has its roots in carny circus/ pro wrestling promotion before they ever got involved in bjj.
