11 / 12

Celebrated the occasion by watching the finale of the 10th Planet Middleweight combat jiu-jitsu qualifiers. 11/12 is the closest thing combat sport athletes and martial artists have for an international holiday.

Gene LeBell v Milo Savage

Joe Rogan Interviews Rickson Gracie

Some great insights into jiu-jitsu past, present, and future from one of the art's greatest ever. Also featuring Eddie Bravo. Especially love Rickson's separating MMA from vale tudo, and his comparison of no time limit vale tudo fights and five-hour long professional tennis matches.

When He Hollers ... A Look at the Palhares Heel Hook

Ever since they turned vale tudo into mixed martial arts, I've lamented that there is no jiu-jitsu-grappling analogue to the massive advantage of gloved hands for strikers. If there is one thing that favors striking over jiu-jitsu in MMA, this is it.

There was one way of restoring at least some balance. And no one made the case better than Frank Mir, whose tap or snap attitude - a talk walked in brutal submission victories over Pete Williams, Tim Sylvia, and the legendary Minotaro Nogueira - made jiu-jitsu scary again. You punch my face. I snap your arm. You kick my head. I pop your knee.

You can see this in the beauty of Royce Gracie's performances in the vale tudo-era UFC. The armlocks on DeLucia, Kimo, and Hackney. Those submissions weren't "just getting caught" as so many have dismissively referred to submission losses in MMA in the past few years.  Those armlocks were for keeps.

Which brings me to Palhares. The heel hook is the ultimate tap or snap technique. Worse than a two-step snake or a poison that paralyzes before it kills, the heel hook is capable of destroying almost before it hurts. In the hands of naive defender, the results can be inadvertently disastrous. In the hands of an aggressive (to say nothing of overly-aggressive) attacker, the results can be just as ruinous.

I've seen armlocks and kneebars held longer than Palhares' heel hook while referees tugged mistakenly at the most hyperextended part of the trapped limb as they called a stop to a fight. And to put it bluntly, the last person in the universe who should be convinced of the success of a submission hold should be the one applying it - at least when it comes to mixed martial arts.

In a world in which tapping to a submission is really no big deal, but tapping to strikes is a character deficit of the highest martial order, I'll admit to being willing to give a victorious grappler a second to untangle himself - and for the opponent to learn to concede (and concede quickly) even if as much out of fear of the submission as the submission itself. This isn't amateur sport jiu-jitsu. This is how they've decided to change vale tudo into MMA. I urge jiu-jitsu fighters to adjust accordingly.

And if you aren't ready forgive Palhares' heel hook or Babalu's choke, maybe wondering what the world would have been like with Vitor Belfort regaining the UFC Light Heavyweight belt will help.

"I've always had great respect for Jon Jones and know he is a great champion. When I felt his arm snap, I decreased the pressure, and he got out. Simple as that. During the bout, he managed to work his elbows well (from the top), but I was never afraid. But he was very good in the fight."

Does Jiu-Jitsu Need MMA?

If your initial conception of jiu-jitsu was formed while watching Royce Gracie in the early Ultimate Fighting Championship tournaments in the first half of the 1990s, the intervening years have been interesting ones.

The sport of competitive jiu-jitsu has soared in popularity - with live streams of jiu-jitsu competitions from as far away as Brazil and Abu Dhabi increasingly a regular part of the average BJJ fan's agenda, and the IBJJF expanding its tournament circuit into a new major North American city every time you turn around. As someone who began training as jiu-jitsu superstars like Roger Gracie, Ronaldo Souza, and Marcelo Garcia were dominating the sport jiu-jitsu scene, it was hard not to have an optimistic sense of where this growing emphasis on the jiu-jitsu black belt v.s. jiu-jitsu black belt notion of jiu-jitsu competition seemed to be going.

But watching the black belt debut of one of our contemporary era's up 'n' coming young superstars this evening, I felt my heart sink a bit. Certainly not as a reflection of the performance: an armbar victory is an armbar victory and all the moreso against a talented, proven opponent. 

Nevertheless seeing the entrails of what has become contemporary jiu-jitsu: the emphasis on gi grips, the guard-uber-alles positioning, the endless inversions ... While a part of me enjoys and envies the technical mastery involved, I'll admit that there's another part of me wondering if what seems like an evolution in the art of jiu-jitsu is actually something else entirely.

Fighting against evolution is a dangerous thing. Judo is engaged in this Sisyphus-like labor as we speak, seeking to rid itself of any aspect of Western wrestling by banning direct attacks on the legs. 

This is the same judo that was arguably crippled as a martial art (however bolstered as an Olympic sport) when the time allowed for ne-waza or ground fighting became limited.

But what is evolution? And, maybe more importantly, what is driving the evolutionary change? In sport jiu-jitsu, the driver of change is not increased exposure to new, foreign challenges from outside the art, but instead from increasingly nuanced, increasingly contrived innovations from within the art itself.

This doesn't mean that the result is inherently decadent - though there is a significant danger that this can develop. But consider the same phenomenon in other spheres of endeavor: political theory developed by political scientists, but never influenced by or tested by free citizens or voters. Economic theory developed by economists, but never tested by free markets or a business cycle. Theories of reality developed and debated by philosophers, but never tested by the real world of gravity and physics.

I spent many years studying contemporary poetry. And if there was one thing that characterized contemporary poetry in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, it was that contemporary poetry was only read by those who wrote it. That's an exaggeration. But not by much. It was a very insular world, one that had grown to embrace its own irrelevance to the broader cultural conversation. 

Some may find it hard to believe that it wasn't always so with contemporary poetry. Poets, even American poets, just a generation or two ago were names that most well-read people had heard of: Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Syliva Plath - even if they never really read that much poetry.

All that said to say that I think I know what an art looks like when it becomes more pre-occupied with its own internal dynamics than with the sort of challenges it was originally developed to deal with. That doesn't mean that the art is on the road to obsolescence or irrelevance or decadence. But it does mean that practitioners of the art should be aware of how their art is changing, what is driving that change and, should they decide so, what to do in response.

Eddie Bravo famously said that MMA without jiu-jitsu was bad kickboxing. Of late, I've found myself wondering if jiu-jitsu without MMA - or at least the sort of sensibilities that MMA and vale tudo bring - is a similarly sub-optimal state.

Frank Mir Was Right

Here's another reason why, when it comes to MMA, I've always been a Frank Mir fan.

"He went up against a really good submission guy.  And he got caught. So it wasn't like he got knocked out or he got dominated, you know, through the whole fight."

--Dana White, talking about a replacement fighter for his reality series, The Ultimate Fighter.

Friday Night Fights; Gracie v. Santana