One of my favorite discussion topics is: which fighter has the best jiu jitsu in mixed martial arts?
Eddie Bravo (love him or hate him) has a great preface to his book, Jiu Jitsu Unleashed. While he is mostly talking about his own evolution as a jiu jitero, he is also talking about the evolution of jiu jitsu in mixed martial arts. Sure, Bravo is known as a fairly aggressive anti-gi guy (gi agnostic is probably more accurate and more fair), but many of his concerns as a jiu jitero are those that many of us (read: me) struggle with.
How do you break somebody's posture and keep it broken? How can small guys with short legs utilize the closed guard? How can you become comfortable about going for broke with submissions when you are afraid your game from the bottom is not up to par?
One of Bravo's best observations is the struggle that many jiu jiteros have with the "explosiveness" of wrestlers. While Bravo talks about his rubber guard, for example, as a solution in no gi to the absence of the collar and sleeve as grips, for me the rubber guard is a fantastic tool against wrestlers' "explosiveness" as well as larger fighters with good posture in the closed guard.
Anyway, I say all that to say this: Pride lightweight contender Shinya Aoki has done a better job of using the rubber guard in mixed martial arts than anybody I've ever seen. Moreover, as the highlight below points out, Aoki has a solid non-rubber guard game, as well as a very good game from the top (including takedowns). From what I've read, Aoki has a lot of judo experience, but has been focusing on jiu jitsu more of late. I believe he trains under the legendary Japanese fighter Yuki Nakai, who battled the bigger Rickson Gracie more than a decade ago (a fight that is chronicled in the documentary, Choke.)
So, does Aoki have the best BJJ in MMA? I gave Matt Hughes a lot of credit for being the reigning submission king of the UFC. For a while, nobody in the UFC was submitting their opponents with more regularity than Hughes. Over his 40-5 career, 56% of his finishes (and Hughes finished 32 of his opponents) came by submission.
But jiu jitsu isn't just submissions. It's about a philosophy of succeeding in conflict. Submissions notwithstanding, fighters like Hughes (and Sean Sherk, another wrestler who has submitted a number of opponents) are not submitting opponents from the bottom with any regularity--if at all. And while I hate the notion that jiu jitsu = fighting from the bottom, the ability to successfully defeat an opponent from a "disadvantageous" position like the bottom is one hallmark of the art.
Which brings me back to Aoki. I don't know if he's got the best jiu jitsu in MMA right now. But he's got a lot of grapplers thinking about it. I've started to wonder if there aren't two really successful approaches to the guard in mixed martial arts: a closed guard game that favors the taller, more long-limbed fighters, and a rubber guard game that requires exceptional (but not necessarily genetically exclusive) hip flexibility. Along with BJ Penn, who often works for omoplatas and gogoplatas from the guard, Aoki seems to fall in that latter category.
And as somebody with a body type that is almost perfectly midway between BJ's and Shinya's (and Bravo's, for that matter), I won't pretend that the rubber guard--and what I'd need to achieve it--hasn't gotten my attention.
But enough about me ... Enjoy.
