Quote Originally Posted by Beanflicker View Post
He deserves respect for being a pioneer though.

He was a lanky 170lb dude with seemingly not a hint of muscle, and he was fighting guys much bigger than him with kung fu/karate/judo/pro boxing/wrestling backgrounds and winning.

Art Jimmerson was a 29-5 pro boxer. Ken Shamrock was a huge 230lb + roid monkey with catch wrestling and kickboxing pedigrees. Gordeau was a 6'6'', 230lb Dutch kickboxer. Remco Pardoel was a 240-250lb judo blackbelt. Pat Smith was a solid 230lbs with an extensive kickboxing and submission fighting background, who nearly killed a guy in 30 seconds in his first UFC fight. Kimo was another 240lb roid-monkey with BJJ background. Dan Severn, a 250-260lb greco roman wrestler.

These were some serious dudes to fight for a little 170lb guy
Exactly- no weight limits when he fought, but most important, it was BJJ that Shamrock & others adapted too.

Shamrock tapped out immediately in their first bout- but when he adapted it to his own strategy, yeah different ball game for Gracie.

I'm not into it as much as the early days, but back then it was truly just UFC and not MMA (mixing the arts) as Bruce Lee predicted.

The arts were pitted against each other and as the touraments went on, the best started to adapt.
And the first adapation clearly was the Gracie BJJ.

There are some nice clips on youtube where Royce goes into a few schools with just one discipline and he completely broke every teacher down in front of their own students-even more our military has taken some lessons from the Gracies and added to the Marine Corp McMap program.

Gracies don't dominate the sport created for them (UFC) but heck, the Asians who created & mastered karate, Kung Fu don't either.
Never saw it, but I read about 10 years ago a Shao-lin temple actually competed in a competition: All of them tapped..I was like damn! Snake Fist didn't work? Eagle Style? Crane? Not even Drunken Monkey could win a bout? Dayum!!!