The Return of the Axe Murderer

Cung Le marches to the octagon with the air of Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat. Every fevered dream of a fighter we've had in our kung fu ninja anime fueled adolescence converges on his person as he dances in the cage garbed in Topps trading card company decals. If anyone deserves to be immortalized on cardboard as the symbol of martial artistry, it would be Le.

Despite being in his hometown of San Jose, some jeers are audible. Perhaps they recall Le's back kick careening into Channing Tatum's chest and imagine he's not the real thing anymore. He looks a little doughy around the midsection and there's a hint of disinterest in his eyes. He stretches his leg skyward, flaunting and limbering up in the same motion. His professional seeming team hovers on the cage in near silence.

The lights dim. Darude's Sandstorm swells inside the HP Pavilion crawling through the seats and briefly remaking them in the image of Saitama.  A familiar figure steps through the curtains flanked by CSAC officials in royal blue blazers. 

Wanderlei Silva evokes a different kind of dream. His physique is the yield of the lessons of colliding meat in the sweltering humidity of the Brazilian jungle. His eyes, made friendlier through the deft manipulations of a cosmetic surgeon, have hollowed a bit with age making him resemble more the old butcher who stained many a chalk colored canvas with his unrelenting barrages of violence.  Recognizable warriors such as Rafael Cordeiro and Fabricio Werdum trail him. We hear that his former comrade Anderson Silva served as one of his training partners. His eyes tell us the part he will be playing on this night is no act. Despite the relative comfort he today enjoys, hunger grumbles in Silva's belly.  

He stretches his arm, looking old for a moment, then begins his familiar bouncing from toe to toe. His eyes lock on his target and he seems to forget about trivialities like winning and losing. Le looks skyward to retreat from that menacing gaze.

The referee signals for them to begin and Le mistakes Silva's backpedaling for caution, pressing the action. Le employs his unorthodox striking, creating enough confusion to knock the axe murderer to his knees. The golden boy may yet defeat the monster. Perhaps the bogeyman isn't so scary after all. Perhaps the years of battle have made the ability insufficient to match the heart of the once ferocious warrior. Le's fans awaken and begin a cascade of chants demanding the initiative.

Blood flowing from over Le's eye after a straight shot relatively new to Silva's arsenal changes things. The veteran finisher snorts and catches the scent of victory. His paranthropic hooks seek and find firm purchase on every part of Le's upper body. His shin bursts capillaries in Le's leg and then grazes the side of his head. The horn sounds and Silva impatiently turns to his corner, almost ashamed at having settled for punishment instead of decimation.

As the second frame begins, Le attempts to keep the mauler at bay, but Silva's fists seem to drift through the air with a surety borne of having sent so many men to slumber.  The former Pride middleweight king settles back until his moment arrives then explodes forward unleashing a maelstrom of punches, kicks, elbows and the knees that still keep Tony Petarra awake at night.

 Le defends like a traditionalist and is consigned to history like one, falling to his back then belly in hopes of finding a reprieve from the onslaught.  The referee gives it to him.  As Wanderlei leaps atop the cage to bathe in the adulation of the crowd, there is a sense of alignment with the natural order of things, even in a sport so built on the whims of chance. The world is put on notice. The Axe Murderer still walks among you.

Complete Black & Blue

Read Chapters 1-7


Everything we've completed to date.

                   

 

BJ Penn in ADCC: A Speculative Reminiscence

BJ Penn circa 2001

In April of 2001, the 4th annual Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Grappling World Championship was taking place. Contestants included Vitor Belfort, Ricardo Almeida, Matt Serra, Genki Sudo, Jean Jacques Machado, Renzo Gracie, Royler Gracie, Saulo Ribeiro, Marc Laimon, Mark Kerr, Ricardo Arona and others.

But the young phenom who had just a year before become the first American to win a jiu jitsu world championship at the black belt level was instead gearing up for his MMA debut a month later at UFC 31; only the second official UFC fully put on and organized by the new Zuffa ownership.

The reasons for BJ making his choice have been chronicled elsewhere, but the question remains: How would he have done? BJ walked around then at about 155-160 lbs which technically would've had him contest the 66-76 kg division, but in his mundials competition, he had actually always competed in the 140s. I'm going to assume BJ would've skipped the higher division to let teammate Leo Santos (who ultimately came in 3rd) have his crack at it. Also, in his book, BJ talks about how desperately he had wanted a shot at Royler Gracie who had by then won ADCC twice and the BJJ mundials four times. So let's say BJ's in under 65 kilos. The roster that year included:

Royler Gracie
Baret Yoshida
Alexandre "Soca" de Freitas
Joey Gilbert
Fredson Paixao
Robson Moura
Mike Cardoso
Gustavo Dantas
Hiroyuki Abe
Takumi Yano
Naoya Uematsu
Martin Brown
Yoshinori Konishi
Mitsuoki Hirai
Jean-Neol Charollais
Konstantin Vrachez

Ultimately Royler would win, with BJ's fellow Hawaiian Baret Yoshida coming in 2nd and Nova Uniao teammate Robson Moura coming in 3rd.

To say this division was stacked is certainly an understatement. Royler was then (and arguably still is now) one of the most accomplished grapplers of all time. Soca had already won the inaugural ADCC championship and was runner up to Royler the previous year. Baret Yoshida was boasting a flexibility level to rival BJ's own, though he'd lost in competition to BJ previously, as had Soca. Robson Moura was a world champion as well, but would almost have to be subtracted from the competition in order for BJ to have gone in. According to BJ's own testament, Robson was ahead of him in the pecking order at Nova Uniao so if they'd had to work a match (as many guys in ADCC did), BJ probably would've lost the coin toss. Guys like Yano, Uematsu and Abe had been tearing up the Japanese grappling competition scene in events like G.C.M. Contenders. Gustavo Dantas had an impressive competition resume (though he's more remembered for his match with Baret Yoshida unfortunately) as did Fredson Paixao, who went on to be one of the most durable and legendary competitors for his special wrist lock submissions. Joey Gilbert was an absolute smotherer in ADCC, but lost handily to BJ a month later in his MMA debut ironically.

Still, it likely would've come down to Royler vs. BJ, particularly without Robinho in the mix.

So the question remains: Could BJ have done it? Should he have? After 2001, he spoke at length in an article in Grappling Magazine about wanting to do ADCC. I truly believe if ADCC hadn't shifted to a biennial schedule after 2001 (the next event was in Brazil in 2003), then BJ definitely would've had time between fights to give it a shot. His early MMA career moved very quickly, of course, so who knows what would've happened. Still, it's interesting that the guy BJ fought in his debut decided not to skip ADCC while BJ did.

A more interesting scenario of course involves a BJ who in 2003 was probably walking around closer to 160-165 lbs being a potential candidate to compete in the 66-76 kg weight class that introduced the world to Marcelo Garcia and featured such legendary athletes as BJ's teammate Shaolin, MMA opponent Renzo Gracie, old rival Fernando Terere, training partner Tony DeSouza, tournament mainstay Pablo Popovitch, defending champion Marcio Feitosa and others. There were rumors at the time that BJ would compete, but he was coming off his disappointing draw for the UFC LW title with Caol Uno and likely gearing up for his fight later in the year with Takanori Gomi, which would help anchor his brother's fledgling Rumble on the Rock promotion.

The idea of BJ in that 2003 66-76 kg field in Sao Paolo is a fever dream for many a BJJer. It's almost too much to wrap one's head around.

Thus the more probable scenario remains up for discussion: In 2001, could BJ have climbed the ladder to Royler? Had he done so, would he have been able to knock him off? A scant two years later, another flexible American black belt by the name of Eddie Bravo was able to accomplish the feat. Had BJ done so, I wonder if he would have so quickly followed the attractive lure of the UFC that Dana White and the Fertitta Brothers were selling him or if he would've headed to Japan instead carrying a defeat of a Gracie on his resume. Had he climbed the summit, but lost to Royler, would he have kept trying until he was victorious, devoting himself to BJJ for another two years?

While I've loved his MMA career, a part of me so dearly wishes he had.

The Strange Case of Yoshinori Nishi

Yoshinori Nishi squares off with Rickson Gracie at Vale Tudo Japan 1994

Despite being a pretty big fan of Rickson Gracie, I never actually bothered to watch Vale Tudo Japan '94. I saw the highlights. I saw Rickson dominated and figured that was the whole story. I did watch Vale Tudo Japan '95 not long after it made its way through the tape traders market and fell in love with the "aura" and mystique that was BJJ after having mostly been something of a Pancrase/Shoot/Catch devotee.

I always knew about VTJ '94 though. I knew the names Bud Smith, David Levicki and Yoshinori Nishi better than some of my second cousins. I knew Smith and Levicki were mostly unheralded and had come from traditional martial arts (Levicki having previously fought in UFC 2). Nishi was another story.

I've read varying accounts stating that Nishi was either a judoka with a direct lineage to Masahiko Kimura or a karateka of some note in Japan. Some sources list him as a "Daidojuku champion," which was a sort of proto-mixed martial arts. His age is also something of a question as there are sources that say he was at a very advanced age when he faced Rickson, but it seems his birth year was 1955, which is not that far off from Rickson's own of 1958. He had won the Lumax Cup Tournament of J in 1994, which was another sort of proto-MMA event that served as a launching point for other stars of Japanese MMA such as Sanae Kikuta and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka.

In any case, Nishi, bringing whatever skills he had with him, faced off with Rickson and was dispatched fairly quickly. He did defend fairly admirably from his back using an early prototype of Eddie Bravo's celebrated lockdown until he tried to bridge and ended up mounted, getting pummeled and choked.

Shortly thereafter, Nishi went on to found his own hybrid style called Wa-jutsu which was sort of a blend of judo, catch, wrestling and some jiu jitsu elements. Students of this style included Caol Uno, Yushin Okami and K-Taro Nakamura, all of whom have had decent MMA careers and have really carried the banner for Japanese grappling over the years.

Much as Rickson's defeat of Yuki Nakai in VTJ '95 led to the founding of the first Japanese Gracie jiu jitsu school of note in Paraestra, his defeat of Nishi would lead to the creation of the Wa-jutsu shoot sect.

Ultimately the story of Rickson Gracie's MMA career in Japan does not rest with whether or not he faced credible opposition. In fact, this is only relevant with the benefit of hindsight, because really, who in the wide world of martial arts and combat sports really knew who Rickson Gracie was in 1994--aside from some anecdotal comment of Royce's--or even for sure whether the Gracies hadn't just gotten lucky in the first couple UFCs?

The real story is what doors it opened. Yoshinori Nishi, while little more than a footnote in Rickson's story and a tomato can in some historians' judgment, went on to be one of the most influential people in the evolution of Japanese MMA. The legacy of that fight in the summer of 1994 was a group of champions who gave Rickson's Brazilian jiu jitsu successors all they could handle from the mats of the submission grappling scene to the rings and cages of MMA.

Gracie vs. Nishi

Royce Should've Never Been There

Like everyone, I'm disappointed by the news about Royce Gracie testing positive for the banned substance, Nandrolone following his rematch with Kazushi Sakuraba at K-1 Dynamite. All I thought about was how much I stress to the kids class I teach that jiu jitsu is about technique, not strength. I always submit Royce as proof because at the end of the day, he is the best proof. The little man in the gi who came in and applied his art softly in an event full of hard men. Like most people, Royce was my initial inspiration. I've never been in the greatest shape and I've always appreciated playing a thinking man's game.

As the years have gone by since the early UFCs, Royce's star has dimmed and brightened. I wasn't a fan of a lot of the rhetoric that came out of the Torrance Academy back in the day, but as we would all find out, the man behind the message was Rorion, not Royce. Royce was the public symbol, but he wasn't the politician. When he went out there full of bravado and got put to sleep by Wallid during the Rio Oscars de Jiu Jitsu, the first seeds of doubt began to creep into my mind about whether or not I'd been sold a bill of goods. Wallid, after all, was one of Carlson's boys. Carlson, who had made no secret of his ideology that jiu jitsu needed to be supplemented with strength and conditioning because technique was sometimes not enough. The same Carlson who had put his young protege Vitor Vieira Belfort into the UFC with ground skills and hands to match, though few doubted he was getting along sans "special supplements" around the time he fought and lost to heavy underdog Randy Couture. In those days when the internet was still coming together and information was a little more easily manipulated, Carlson represented the Dark Side of the Force. Seeing Wallid on the cover of Black Belt confirmed it. This wasn't the jiu jitsu I'd embraced.

My infatuation with Rickson began around this time as I felt he had the purest expression of jiu jitsu, but it was an inescapable truth that his genetic gifts bore no resemblance to my own lack thereof and in many ways were the key to his success. A strange Japanese fellow by the name of Sakuraba began slowly doing things that made Wallid's clock choke seem tame. He defeated Royler and then Renzo Gracie. He drew Allan Goes and punished Vitor Belfort. He tapped esteemed non-Brazilian grapplers like Carlos Newton and Tiger White. But the old Jedi would return and put an end to this rampage. Royce was emerging from semi-retirement (after a quick less publicized preliminary match with Nobuhiko Takada) to challenge the Gracie-Hunter.

I watched the edited version of their epic contest on DirectTV. It left me unsatisfied and confused as the chopping left room for interpretation. "Royce probably won on everything but endurance" I reasoned, figuring the editing had painted a grimmer picture than was possible. When I saw the full length fight and subsequent defeat of young Ryan Gracie at Sakuraba's hands as well, it was clear that there was no doubt Royce had lost and lost convincingly.

That fight, Royce's 14th, seemed indicative of a changing of the guard. Perhaps it was time for the legend to retire completely. In fact, maybe it was time for the Gracie family and BJJ as a whole to cede the mantle of most effective combat style. It was time to recognize that this was truly a new sport called Mixed Martial Arts that required proficiency in a number of disciplines.

That was the path ahead as I saw it. Ironically it was around this time that I started to ponder studying more orthodox Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as I'd been practicing a style more akin to shoot or catch-wrestling up until then. I guess I was seeking legitimacy in this new combat sports epoch. Royce wouldn't be heard from again for 3 years.

Why did Royce come back to fight Sakuraba? Prior to his entry into the Pride Grand Prix where he faced Takada, he hadn't fought for 5 years. His legend was relatively secure. He would never stop being a pioneer. It's never been documented that he or his family were even approaching hurting for money. So why did he do it? At the end of the day, it was about family honor. His brother and cousin had lost and he, being the most known and revered Gracie short of Rickson in the MMA world had to step up and be The Man. It was a role he was arguably never suited for. He was thrust into the UFC due to Rorion's machinations and became an unlikely hero in a family of superheroes. So the gunslinger whose ten gallon hat kept slumping on his forehead was now the fastest draw. Except Sakuraba was faster. The loss would haunt Royce more than any other and would change the way his family and their style was viewed around the fighting world.

The next time we saw Royce it was against another Japanese fighter, Hidehiko Yoshida. Royce had elected to answer a challenge from BJJ's parent art, Judo, on what was perhaps the largest MMA stage the world had ever seen. Pride/K-1 ShockWave/Dynamite 2002 featured theatrics aplenty, but perhaps none were so memorable as the odd stoppage of Royce's fight as Yoshida told the referee that he believed Royce had slipped unconscious in a choke. Video footage clearly showed otherwise, which lead to an uproar amongst both the fan base and the Gracie family. But Royce could only be so angry. The fight, while ostensibly promoted as a Judo vs. BJJ or Japan vs. Brazil showdown was actually little more than a stunt fight. There was no family honor at stake, nor did the match have any significance in the larger picture of MMA rankings. It was part of a show clearly designed to entertain. Royce, unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of the show business and few were interested in his talk of honor or fairness. After all, Pride had a new hero to replace the beleaguered Sakuraba and Royce was little more than the Kingmaker.

It was role I suspect Royce chafed in.

If memory serves, it was right around this time that Royce started to distance himself from Gracie Torrance and went his own way. His book with cousin Charles focusing on Self Defense Techniques was doing well and his network of Royce Gracie academies seemed to have finally coalesced into a legitimate whole. Ryron and Rener were seizing the reins at the Torrance Academy and Royce seemed determined to truly carve out his own niche.

The culmination of this was a highly personal rematch with Yoshida at Pride ShockWave 2003 which ended in a draw, but was a victory for Royce in the eyes of fight fans everywhere. Royce came in like a man possessed and did what he set out to. Realistically, that fight would have been sufficient punctuation to an already storied career, but Royce wasn't done. Around the time of the second Yoshida fight, something noticable had changed in Royce. It wasn't clear whether it was a renewed hunger to compete and prove he was the best or simply a hunger for more high paycheck fights. The Yoshida fights alone had netted him more money than he'd ever made as a pro fighter, even more than when he'd defeated 4 men in a night to claim the sophomore UFC title.

Royce's next few fights would seem to suggest it was the latter that primarily motivated him. He fought what was clearly a showman's match against sumo wrestler Akebono then fought late replacement lightweight sensation Hideo Tokoro to a draw (which many feel Royce lost). He would go on to be dominated by UFC welterweight juggernaut Matt Hughes at UFC 60, almost 2 years to the date after he had been inducted into that organization's Hall of Fame.

If ever there was a time to hang up the gloves, that was it, but Royce assured fans that he wasn't done. His return would be a year later in southern California in front of friends, family and students as he worked to avenge the most devastating blemish on his career. The rematch with Sakuraba had arrived.

The fight was lackluster. That much is certain. Royce was aggressive enough in the eyes of the judges to get a decision. Announcers and commentators around the sport quickly became apologists as they defended these two legends who eked out a match worthy of TUF 2. But it was vindication for BJJers like myself who had never quite gotten over Sakuraba's dominance of the Gracie family. BJJers have beaten Sakuraba since, but it was Royce (or Rickson) who needed to get the W or it didn't mean as much.

Then Royce tests positive for steroids and the whole MMA and BJJ world is turned on its head.

Many crawled from the woodwork to throw stones at Royce (most notably those who christened him the ever-so catchy Hoids Disgracie). I was in shock, but not in as much shock as I suspect some others were. After all, as some contend, steroid use is rampant in professional sports and MMA is no exception. But there are certainly different classes of athlete who use performance enhancing drugs and Royce seems to fit a very particular profile.

Young athletes are often caught juicing because they're looking for the extra edge to distinguish them from the pack and make them into a superstar. Talent is an unfair qualifier. Hard work has to count for something and if you want to be able to work a little harder a little faster, why not dope? That is, if you can escape detection.

Older athletes, on the other hand, seem to juice for the same reason Sammy Sosa told us he was putting cork in his bat. The older athlete finds his performance slowly starting to decline. He doesn't have the same snap on his punches or the same power to his hip bump and he's got the fight of his life coming up against his arch-rival in a fight that will be the capstone of his career.

What do you do?

You retire with that last loss on your record, the voice of reason might say, but it's easy to suppress, particularly when you consider that this is the fight you want more than anything and that most people think your adversary is at his weakest. But what if you're weaker? Worse than getting pounded into submission by a younger man is the idea of losing a war of attrition akin to the last loss where essentially you quit because there was nothing left in the tank. It's an admission that the fighter you were is dead and even in decline, your worst adversary is still a better man than you. Too big a risk. Don't take the fight. But you have to take the fight. Your family, your friends, your students all want it. Fans are looking forward to it. Sure it's a stunt fight, but it's the only stunt that matters.

So you spike the vein and you tell yourself "no chances." And you go and fight a fight so conservative that you can't lose.

At 40 years of age, Royce Gracie has fought a total of 19 fights. If he were a boxer, he'd be a rookie in terms of experience, but barring either Bernard Hopkins athleticism or George Foreman doggedness, he'd be looking for a gym that would take him on as a trainer. He, along with his cousin Renzo, Randy Couture and a few others are holding the line in MMA, teaching us what the shelf life in this relatively new sport actually is. The fact that we can call 19 matches in anything a career, let alone enough to make one a legend seems crazy, but when a sport is still in its growing stage, those are the facts. Royce, Renzo, Dan Severn and Ken Shamrock are the only semi-active fighters from those halcyon days of MMA's formative years. While all of them have endured pressure in staying active, none have known it to the degree Royce has, as America's standard bearer for what an MMA champion is. He is unquestionably THE pioneer, but he is also undeniably past his prime.

MMA as a whole needs to do a better job of letting its legends go before true lethal danger becomes the rule and not the exception. Fighters like Severn who are still fighting as they approach the age of 50, do us more of a disservice than anything. As much as I have loved the rennaissance of Randy Couture's career, I would rather see him enjoying retirment and adjusting to life outside the wars of the cage. Everyone thinks they have one more fight left in them, but what besides spectacle makes fans pay to see it? Ask any MMA fan and his proudest boast is that this is a sport now. Spectacle should be left to the past.

The question will always linger whether or not Royce should have even been in the cage in 1993. But there can be no doubt that the man once known as the "greatest martial artist in the world" should never have set foot in that ring on June 2nd. The mistake he made while trying to push his glory days just a little further will tarnish one of the greatest stories in all of sports. David, not content with beating Goliath, ultimately didn't think he could be successful without becoming Goliath.