Eddie Bravo and Joe Rogan break down how he introduced his six-year-old son to martial arts via Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon and nunchuck scenes, contrasting Lee’s hybrid style with modern MMA’s evolution—from UFC’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu dominance (e.g., Royce Gracie’s triangle choke) to striking-heavy fighters like Darren Till and Vinny Magalese. They dissect Khabib Nurmagomedov’s takedown mastery over Conor McGregor, Ferguson’s gymnastic-influenced grappling, and the rare Ezekiel choke’s impact, while pivoting to Bravo’s upcoming Combat Jiu-Jitsu event (Sept 29) and Rogan’s Toronto rescheduling. MMA’s technical shift proves guard retention and ground control can outweigh striking volume, reshaping combat sports forever. [Automatically generated summary]
You remember the scene with Han with the razor hand.
He had a razor hand.
He had a claw hand.
You remember Bolo Young and they're fighting outside in the tournament.
You remember all that shit.
You remember Williams getting killed, they hung him.
You remember Williams fighting Han.
There's certain scenes everyone will remember, and you forget about the little scenes in the plot.
So I sit down with my son, and we're watching this, and his mom's like, it's appropriate for a six-year-old, right?
It's not going to get too crazy.
I go, it's fine.
It's just a bunch of karate.
It's fine.
So she's all like, hmm.
So, we're sitting there, and he can't stop asking goddamn questions.
He can't stop asking goddamn questions.
The bad guys are Hans the main guy, O'Hara, Bob Wall, remember him?
Everybody remembers he had the scar on his face.
And everyone remembers that he was, him and his gang were chasing Bruce Lee's sister in the movie, and they cornered her, and she had to kill herself.
She just killed herself before they could rape her or whatever.
People remember that.
That's another classic scene.
But you don't think about all the shit in between, man.
Because the plot of the story is Han lives on an island and he does a lot of illegal shit.
He runs heroin and prostitution through his island, right?
And he has a tournament once a year and he invites all the greatest martial artists on earth and he tries to recruit them.
He sits them all down and he shows them his underground operation going on.
You know what I mean?
So he tried to talk Roper into it.
He tried to talk Williams into it.
And Roper almost went for it because he was a good guy, but he was like a gambler.
You know what I mean?
He's kind of shady.
But at the end, he's like, fuck this.
I ain't going to do this shit.
So that's what he does.
And he called him Bruce Lee, too.
And he was going to try to recruit Bruce Lee.
But the CIA... Got ahold of Bruce Lee first.
Yes.
Seriously.
So they get ahold of Bruce Lee and they sit him down in a dark room and they're playing a projector and they're showing, you know, they want Bruce Lee to go in there undercover to uncover all the...
And then, boom, you forget about the scenes where...
Han has like a madam, and he's got all these hookers.
There's a hooker scene.
You forget about the hooker scene.
They send like five girls to Williams, who's a good guy, and Roper to try to corrupt them, you know what I mean?
And boom, as soon as they're all in their gowns and in robes, and Williams is like in a rope, and I grab the remote and just start hitting fast-forward, and my son's like, wait, what's going on here?
What's going on here, Dad?
Why are you fast-forward?
Nothing's going on.
What are they doing?
They're getting ready to go to sleep.
Just forget about that scene.
Boom!
You forget that there's a...
Is this the scene?
There it is right there.
And there's titties and everything.
Yeah, he was blown away and mission accomplished.
He's Bruce Lee's number one to him.
But I made a mistake.
Next week, I made him sit down and watch Return of the Dragon, which the end scene was a great scene with Chuck Norris and the old Rome Coliseum, but the whole movie before that is so bad.
It's so bad.
And Bruce Lee, he directed it and wrote it, and it's atrocious.
It's...
Except for the...
Fight scene.
Yeah, except for the end, but it's like high school kids put together that movie.
I think his uncle or just somebody he knows has a Chinese restaurant in Italy.
And the Italian mob, these guys, these are the goons, they're trying to run them out of business and control their business or pay them off to take the building or something.
And they're resisting in Italy.
So they send Bruce Lee from Hong Kong to handle the mob in Italy.
Do you think Bruce Lee was just partying too much, doing a little blow, having a good time out in the town, being a big Hollywood star, puts together this movie, and he just got a little crazy with it?
You know when you when you think about there was no kind of movies like this before this this fight scene greatest fight scene worst movie How about the grab of the chest hair pulls a chunk of it out?
Yeah, oh shit.
I got your chest hair bitch I mean, it's funny watching it with no volume, too, because it's so corny.
Like, his kicking technique, especially for back then...
Yeah, I think because of the YouTube and shit there's there's so many guys out there that they're doing like These jump spinning 360 wheel kicks.
There was some guy that Winkle John Jackson had on his The Instagram page and it's a Korean gentleman doing some fucking ridiculous shit just like Jumping 360 degree wheel kicks and a series of cartwheels flying through the air and doing all these things.
None of this was ever in the movies before.
Until when?
Maybe Jet Li, I guess?
No, Ong Bak, right?
Because they're They're a next level in terms of like athleticism.
He starts out normal, throws like a bunch of front kicks, throws a bunch of side kicks, and then he starts doing jumping wheel kicks, 360 wheel kicks, tornado kicks.
He's just fucking flying through the air and flipping through the air.
Aerial cartwheel kicks.
You're like, whoa!
People can do shit now, and they do stuff in martial arts films.
I remember seeing a preview for it, and I would watch...
All boxing events, no matter what.
I was a boxing fanatic.
I didn't miss any of those big fights ever.
Even the small Tuesday night fights.
I recorded that on my VCR. Always taped boxing events.
Never missed them.
But I didn't watch that.
I go, you know what?
I thought it looks like it might be fake.
I thought it may be like a Fight Zone.
Remember Fight Zone?
A little WWE, but trying to make it look more martial arts oriented.
So I didn't watch it.
You end up hearing, shit, that was real.
And I'll never forget, my roommate came home from Guitar Center and he said, man, that UFC thing, that UFC challenge, that shit's for real, man.
I go, really?
And I was doing karate at the time.
And I go, was there a karate guy in there?
He goes, yeah, but he got beat by some, I think he was Iranian, man.
He was just choking everybody out.
He would just, I go, he was choking everybody out?
What do you mean he would just grab their throat?
He goes, dude, yeah.
He would just grab their fucking throat, some Iranian guy, and he would choke, he choked everybody out.
That's what the guy told me at Guitar Center.
I'm like, holy shit, karate too?
I'm like, fuck, maybe I'm doing the wrong style.
And then the UFC 2 came out, and I remember I told my same roommate, he was staying home, it was on the weekend, and I was going out on the town, and I remember calling him and saying, hey dude, that UFC 2, that UFC challenge thing is on tape, because he was going to stay home with his girlfriend.
He taped it, I got home, watched that motherfucker on tape.
I... I couldn't stand Hoist Gracie that first half of the show.
I just wanted him to lose so bad.
When he fought Minoki Ichihara, he was a karate guy.
To me, that was my hero.
I mean, I was doing karate for six months, man.
You know what I mean?
I was all about karate.
I didn't want Hoist to beat him.
But by the time we got to the finals, I was a gigantic Hoist fan.
I go, you know what?
I gotta learn this jujitsu.
And I just quit karate and found the Machados in the valley.
I mean, it is not a martial art in that it has finishing holds of its own.
Because most of it is just taking people down and holding them down and getting back up.
But if you can master that, that is like one of the most important aspects of martial arts.
I mean, and we never thought about it that way.
It took forever.
It's almost like it took the UFC to show that.
It took the UFC to show that over and over again.
And I really worry, or wonder rather, what would have happened if the UFC in 93 had never been invented?
Because if there was never any kind of a tournament like that that threw all these fighters together in a real organized way, and you got real top-level guys from each discipline eventually making their way into the UFC, what the fuck, man?
But make no mistake about it, the ground fighting was just on another level.
You could say whatever the hell you want, but when you watch Alan Goze fighting Pancrase against Frank Shamrock, Man, you see the difference in jiu-jitsu back then.
The UFC did that Pancrase didn't do and mainly because nobody In the Western Hemisphere even knew what the fuck it was it was a Japanese thing so it's gonna be hard to change the world when you're You know only televised in Japan and back then you know you had to get like someone someone had to mail you a VHS tape You know what I mean you had to go to weird Japanese stores and see that so but the UFC made it clear
that the Brazilians We're doing a form of ground fighting that was beyond and more sophisticated than what we're seeing in Japan or anywhere else in the world.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu moves, I mean have been done in judo and they're actually they came from judo.
We know that the Japanese know that But a lot of American judo guys don't they can't they can't seem to grasp that because they're like, you know the Gracie's ripped off and new waza It's all about new waza.
We you know, there was a you know a sect of Judo where they did focus on the ground but and that's all true, but the major difference is The Brazilians, they wanted to do a style where there wasn't a time limit on the ground.
In judo, you could only fight on the ground for, I don't know, 30 seconds.
It's limited.
It's not that much time.
So when you don't have that much time, there's a lot of shit you don't need to waste your time drilling.
Because you're only going to be down there for 30 seconds.
You need to focus on the moves that work in 30 seconds.
And that's it.
You don't have time to set shit up and be patient and relax.
You can't clench and catch your breath.
You gotta go into it.
So what the Brazilians did is just allowed the fight to unfold on the ground and not have any stand-ups and just let them fight on the ground.
And when that happens, there's a lot...
There's so much more you can do when there's no time limit on the ground.
Not like no time limit.
I mean, you know, they're not going to, without stand-ups where you could just, most of the matches takes place on the ground.
The game just evolves so quickly and so rapidly and that you can't compare.
Like Japanese guys come down to Brazil and they've been doing judo their whole life and they get smoked by Brazilians.
That always happens in the world championships.
The Brazilians are just on the ground all day.
And the guys that do judo, they're on the ground a little bit.
They're never going to be able to compete in a sport where there's no stand-ups.
So to say that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is just judo, you've got to think about it.
You've got to really break it down because it's ridiculous.
There's so many silly connections that people have to arts.
I mean, there's people that legitimately think that white people shouldn't be able to teach karate because it's cultural appropriation because it's a Japanese art.
There's people that think that's stupid.
I think all of it's martial arts now.
I mean, I think the roots and the bases are very important to recognize that, you know, hey, Brazil did do a crazy thing with jiu-jitsu.
Hey, the Thais did do a crazy thing with leg kicks and elbows and knees.
There's really some people that have contributed to martial arts in this really insane way.
The people that highlight those disciplines like the elite of the elites like the bull cows and the Sanchez and the Marcelo Garcia's and the Jacare's like all these people that highlight it on in each art They're all like super super important, but overall It all comes into one thing and that's that's martial arts.
I think martial arts.
It's really at this point It's really I mean, ultimately it's one thing now.
Ultimately, when you think about UFC, when you think about just Bruce Lee movies, what is it?
What's the best way to fight?
It's all together now.
It's all combined.
Because the best way is not just wrestling.
It's wrestling with ferocious striking.
It's wrestling with leg kick defense.
It's wrestling with submission holds.
It's all these different things.
You have to have all these things.
You can't just be one thing anymore.
It's interesting to be from one discipline, but if your kid is coming up right now, and he's like your son's age, and he starts to learn martial arts techniques, I think by the time he gets to be our age, it's just going to be martial arts.
People are just going to be taking martial arts.
I don't think there's going to be as many specialists in the future, and I think that's probably a shame.
But who's going to want, from a guy who did Taekwondo his whole life, who's going to want to do that now?
Yeah, but when you talk about jiu-jitsu, most people that do jiu-jitsu are not doing it, or they don't stay in it for the long haul and make it a lifestyle for the self-defense aspects.
We've talked about this before, but the big difference between guys who train together with jiu-jitsu versus guys who train together with kickboxing is the kickboxing people, they fucking hurt each other all the time.
Like, bad.
They're beating each other up.
They're kicking each other and punching each other and shit.
Jiu-jitsu guys tap each other out and they're like, oh, I'm going to get you back, bitch.
I mean, opening up a jiu-jitsu school in society today is one of the safest bets out there.
It gets so addicting.
You can't download jiu-jitsu.
You can't pirate jiu-jitsu.
Sparring, rather.
You can't you have to go to a place and you have to go to a place where there's a bunch of different and the more people there are the better The more variety of roles you can get because you don't want to just roll with the same guy all the time You want to mix it up mix your style with that guy's style Go with a new guy who doesn't know your secret moves and you go you like going with new dudes where your your Setups work because the guys that you've been rolling with for a while They smell out all your setups and now you got to come up with new setups and then you got to figure out a different way around this problem It's just It's just too much fun, man.
It's so addicting and it has nothing to do with...
I wouldn't say nothing, but you do enjoy the self-defense aspects.
If anything went down, it makes you feel better in certain situations.
You're not...
As worried about things as you might be.
If you didn't know martial arts, you know the one thing that I'm gonna start doing once I'm totally healed again is I'm gonna start kickboxing.
Too many videos on Instagram where dudes are getting lit up.
You've got to have the ability to knock somebody out if you had to.
And not do jiu-jitsu.
There's many situations where in a real life altercation, getting on the ground is not the best idea.
And being able to light someone up.
Or like three dudes.
No way you're going to be three dudes with jiu-jitsu.
And it happens.
You see it on videos.
It's like a myth.
It's like a mythical thing.
You can't beat multiple attackers.
Yes, you fucking can.
Like, you could with your striking.
If there was three dudes and they were starting shit, you're like, okay, I'm gonna knock this motherfucker out first, and then hopefully one dude will start running, and then I'll fucking clean up the second guy, you know, or whatever.
It's important if you think that someone might be hitting you.
Like if you think someone, this motherfucker looks like he's gonna swing on me.
Like I got a feeling like he's gonna swing on me.
Yeah.
There's that moment when you're in a heightened sense of danger.
If you don't understand space, That's a real big thing.
One of the things about sparring that's really important is that you know when you're safe and when you're not safe.
A lot of people don't know.
They don't know when they can hit someone, when someone can hit them.
If you think someone's going to hit you and you can't get some space between them, you have to be ready.
And you have to understand, you have to have someone have swung on you before.
So as you're seeing shit coming, you got to be able to, oh, his back leg is going, okay, I see his weight dipping, oh, the right hand's coming!
You have to know certain patterns, otherwise you lock up.
That's the scariest thing you ever see in a fight.
This dude's like, things start swinging and they just lock up because they don't know where it's coming from.
They don't know what's happening.
That's the most dangerous.
It's Almost more important for defense than it is for anything.
Because half the time if you were ever in a fight with someone and they start just swinging at you, if you have good defense, you just stand there with your hands up and you wait.
After all the shit, after everything, all the kung fu he grew up with, he got to the States and he realized, holy shit, this Wing Chun isn't working on these tall white boys.
Yeah, it's true in a lot of ways if the guy doesn't know takedown defense and the guy doesn't know how to actually box dude I remember when I first started doing first started learning boxing and kickboxing from all my years of doing Taekwondo and I threw punches in Taekwondo, but I had a crazy distorted perception of My ability with my hands like I thought I'd be able I know how to strike I just knew how to do Taekwondo.
I was good at that.
And when I started kickboxing, I was getting lit up, especially when you're in a ring.
It's got hand techniques, but when you fight in tournaments, everything is below the neck for punches.
So everything is below here.
It's just the body for punches.
And you can kick to the head and you can kick to the body and you can't kick to the legs.
So all it does is make you really good at kicking.
That's what it really does.
But the distance is all fucked up.
And then I realized that once I started doing kickboxing, oh my distance is so fucked up because when I think I'm safe, I still get punched in the face, and if they crowd me, they get punched in the face and I can't kick them.
Like, my distance is all messed up.
And then it's also way easier to punch me than I thought it was.
So I had to learn!
And in learning, it was fucking super humbling, man.
Super humbling.
Because I went from being someone who I considered myself like an elite striker.
Like, I was on a national level for Taekwondo.
I fought in a lot of national tournaments.
I fought like A bunch of guys were really good, and I hung in there with them.
I thought I was really good.
Just regular kickboxers were beating the fuck out of me.
Just beating my ass, dude.
Just getting me in the corner, jabbing me, hooking off the jab, right hand.
Well, you know, one thing that is interesting is karate at least emphasizes the idea of punching things without gloves on.
Because there is a difference.
There's a pretty big difference between punching things with gloves on and without gloves on.
And one of the things that karate figured out a long time ago is you've got to condition your knuckles.
Condition your hands and condition your knuckles.
They never had that even, I mean, I guess maybe some people had it in Taekwondo, but it was never anything in my organization, where they had like a makawara, which is like a, if you don't know what we're talking about, there's a board with rope wrapped around it, just hard rope, and they just fucking smack!
Punched that rope until their knuckles became like...
Maybe that's a maybe that's a fake rumor too, but a lot of those guys that that did that they would practice on Macawarras and on bricks and just constantly be punching bricks and yeah, so John had Hands where he could look legitimately punch someone very hard and not worry about it with a bare knuckle whereas a lot of A lot of people, man, your hand is way weak.
Think about what your hand is.
Move your hand around like this.
Think about all these little parts.
This is the worst thing you want to hit somebody with.
The one thing we failed to mention that we should bring up is whether or not Horian Gracie or Art Davey were influenced by Pancreas or not, like what came out first a few months later.
In Brazil, they were doing that shit since like the 20s and 30s and 40s, right?
So really, it probably all started in Brazil if you break it down like that.
I mean, Helio Gracie was fighting, what, in the 40s or the 50s or something?
It says in Maeda's Wikipedia that in 1879, Ulysses S. Grant, former president at the time, visited Japan and while in Tokyo attended a jiu-jitsu presentation.
But the problem, and the big problem with catch wrestling, and it has a lot of wonderful things, for sure.
A lot like, you know, the Kimura.
There's a lot of great shit in catch wrestling.
But the fact that...
But you can't work from your full guard means that not only does the system have no guard work, really, or super limited guard work, like someone's going to send me a picture.
Look, a picture of some old catch wrestler in the guard or something.
Yes, yes, yes.
I get it.
It existed.
But I'm talking about...
A sport where you're allowed to work from the guard without being stood up or without being penalized.
You know what I mean?
Y'alls didn't have that.
So what that means is the guard passing was non-existent as well.
If you're not allowed to play guard, why would you bother learning and drilling all these different pass combos?
It's a lot of time.
So that's...
What the catch wrestling was missing was the guard and the guard passing.
They had all the submissions, and it's a beautiful thing.
But it was like that in Japan in a lot of ways, too.
When you watch old pancreas, no one's working from the guard.
There's no technical half-guard stuff.
It's just wide-open, basic movements off your back.
And that's the biggest thing that the Brazilians brought to the game is Guard passing, which means on the flip side, you've got to have a super hard guard to pass.
And that changes everything.
That changed everything in trying to figure out a way to do real fights.
That's why they had to fake a lot of fights, because there was so much missing.
When you put two white belts together on the ground, there's not going to be a submission going on.
It's not going to be entertaining to watch two people on the ground in a position like the guard or whatever.
You just don't spend a lot of time and it gets really boring.
So that's why you'd have to fake it.
What do you mean by fake it?
Pro-wrestling.
The origins of pro-wrestling.
I mean, if you think about pro-wrestling, pro-wrestling is just a fake UFC. Because they're on the ground, they do leg locks and shit.
They'll do go-go-plathos now, the gravedigger, the undertaker.
Only because they would have did it before if they would have known it was possible.
They just didn't spend enough time on the ground without stand-ups and without penalties to figure out there's so much you could do on the ground.
And that's what changed everything.
That's what made it so that you don't have to fake fights anymore.
Although there are fake fights, you know, especially in Japan.
So this weekend is Darren Till versus Wonderboy, excuse me, versus Tyron Woodley.
Why did I say versus Wonderboy?
What kind of flip was that?
You know why?
Because I was reading an article, this is a really interesting article, about Wonderboy and his last three fights.
The two fights with Tyron Woodley that were super duper close.
And then one fight with Darren Till that was also really close.
And they were talking about like how...
If you looked at it on paper, the people from outside, I think they were saying the global scorecard, I think that's how they're describing it, meaning how people scored it on average around the world.
More people gave it to Wonderboy than gave it to Darren Till.
And the same thing happened with the Tyron Woodley fights.
I feel like the decisions were right in all those fights.
I feel like in the Woodley fights in particular, Woodley hurt Wonderboy.
Wonderboy didn't really hurt Woodley.
I think that counts for more.
It just does.
Tyron Woodley had him out.
He had him really hurt.
And Wonderboy never had Tyron in that kind of trouble in either one of those fights.
So I would give that advantage clearly to Tyron.
I would think that if he lost that fight, that wouldn't make any sense.
Because fights are supposed to be about who does the most damage, who's more effective.
I mean, Wonderboy was effective for more time.
But that's just like movement and sticking and hitting him with small shots.
But Tyron put him on, you know, unconsciousness's door.
Yeah, and the way it is, right, so if you win the first matchup, right, if there's not a submission, it's submission only, if there's not a submission and time runs out, both those fighters are out.
It's whoever has the last fighter standing wins, right?
He couldn't tap you He's so much bigger and when I saw him yanking on his arm It's terrifying to watch he's like thinking about all the damage it's doing to that elbow and that shoulder Yep, and he's trying to pass his guard and put a camor on you know, he's got four minutes to do it So we're all thinking it would be great if Gio could tap this guy, but at the very least knock him out You know what I mean?
Just survive because who knows he could have cleaned he could have cleaned out the whole team look at this animal Just crazy.
Luckily, he's so good at kimuras that he's created so many kimura monsters down at his school that he has to deal with kimuras all the time, so that's why he was able to survive.
And if you watch it, the only way he could guillotine him was by almost sweeping him, getting him on his butt, and before he could stand up, he jumped on that head and arm.
Well, that's one of the more interesting things about jiu-jitsu, is that jiu-jitsu is an art where a smaller person with technique really can beat a bigger person.
That happened a month and a half ago, and there have already been tournaments.
Blue Belt Quintet Tournament.
We're having a quintet tournament at the 10th Planet Eclipse, which is where we all get together once a year and have a party and do business stuff, like a business summit meeting.
Quintec 3 card will feature Sakuraba himself in action, along with fellow UFC Hall of Famer Uriah Faber, former UFC heavyweight champion Josh Barnett, and elite grappling champions, including three-time EBI winner Gio motherfucking Martinez.
And I think what you're going to see is Till doing a lot of what he did in the Wonderboy fight, which is attack that lead leg with a front leg sidekick.
He does that a lot.
And it's an awful kick.
If you get hit with it, hyperextends your knee.
And he does it really well.
It's a real controversial kick.
I mean, I don't know really that it should be.
If it's legal to grab your leg in a heel hook and rip it apart, why isn't it legal to sidekick your leg?
I mean, I don't think it's dirty at all.
The thing is that you can't, the idea is that you can't tap from it.
Darren Till, Eddie Bravo back from the pisser.
Darren Till, he's known for this, in the Wonderboy fight, he threw these hard front leg sidekicks to the knee.
Just like Robert Whitaker did to Yoel Romero, and just like Yoel Romero did to him in the previous fight.
Like that front leg sidekick to the knee has become a big kick.
And Till's really good at it.
I think that's going to be a big factor in this fight, is distance.
Like, if Till can keep his distance and use his reach, you know, because it says the same reach, but that doesn't make any sense.
He lets himself almost get pushed back to the cage, and then he launches forward.
If you watch when he KO'd Josh Koscheck, he almost lets guys press him up against the cage, and then they expose themselves, and then he attacks back.
Rory McDonald figured out a way to nullify that.
He was the...
But that was also a different Tyron Woodley because that was Tyron Woodley before Duke Rufus.
See, most people don't realize that even though Tyron Woodley was, like, world-class, one of the best welterweights on the planet, he was really kind of training himself.
He was working with different people all over the country, but he didn't have a main head coach.
He didn't get one until he started training with Duke Rufus.
So from Duke Rufus on, it's like you're looking at a different fighter.
He's much better at, like, relaxing, conserving his energy.
He doesn't get tired in the later rounds anymore.
He's much more effective, and he also knows not to get sucked in by the crowd, like in the Wonderboy fights in particular.
People were saying it's boring, but you have to fight Wonderboy that way.
You can't charge at him.
If you charge at Wonderboy, you get lit up.
You get lit up with these crazy counter-strikes.
You've got to wait for Wonderboy to lead.
And Wonderboy was leading, and Tyron still, again...
Wonderboy landed more shots, but Tyron hurt him way more.
But that was the fight where Kelvin didn't make weight.
He was all fucked up coming into that fight.
But Woodley won.
But that was also, I want to say, that was right when he started with Duke, or maybe he started with Duke after that.
Either way, the Robbie Lawler fight is a good example.
What he can do, what Woodley can do, is put the best guys in the world out with one shot.
Guys who nobody puts out.
Who the fuck puts out Robbie Lawler?
Robbie Lawler gets hit with bombs and survives.
And Tyron Woodley put one on him, knocked him out.
I mean, he can do that to anybody, and he can do that to Darren Till too.
I mean, if Darren Till doesn't think that coming into this fight because he's the more accomplished striker, it's a very dangerous fight for him.
Woodley's so fucking fast.
But then again, if Darren Till can find his rhythm, establish his distance, and start using those kicks, in particular that front leg sidekick, man, he fucks your leg up with that, and then his leg kicks, and then his leg kicks with combinations, and he also, he's real creative with his striking.
Maybe Woodley's best strategy would be to just take him down over and over again and try to mount him and try to take his back and try to do some ground and pound.
You know, what we know about him is he likes to strike.
Big, tall dude likes to strike.
Nasty striker.
You know, one of the more impressive things that he did is not the knockout of Cowboy, but when he hit him with that elbow.
He hit him with this step-in elbow where I was like, Jesus, the speed of it, man.
It's like the smoothness of his closing the distance and the speed of landing that elbow.
Like he showed Cowboy different distances and then he left this opening for that elbow and he slides in and cracks him with it and you're like, oh Jesus.
Like here's him against Cowboy.
See how his hands are down low.
He's got a lot of movement of his hands.
But that jab comes from the bottom.
It comes from underneath.
You don't know until it's too late whether he's just probing you or whether he's punching you.
There's a lot of that.
See a lot of that with the hands?
And he keeps his chin straight up in the air, but he also is really good at moving his head back.
He's also really used to high-level sparring and high-level fighting.
He's an elite guy, man, and a dangerous kind of weird style in a lot of ways.
Fucking let's talk about like hilarious inside shit in the world of jiu-jitsu and MMA like his fake feud with me Vinnie Magalese is hilarious That's a real feud man They hate each other, trust me.
I'd have to ask Vinny Shorman the full background of him, but Vinny was one of the ones who told me about him a long time ago.
He told me about him when he was first fighting in the UFC. He's like, you've got to watch this guy.
He's fucking special.
And he said, in his Liverpool accent, because Vinny's from Liverpool too, he said when the Cowboy fight was going on, he's like, Cowboy doesn't know what he's in for.
He thinks he's just going to go in there and fight this guy and doesn't need to watch tape on him.
That's a good fight because Ryan Hall, although he's got good kicks and he's good at keeping guys on the outside, he's very smart at using his kicks to set up his jiu-jitsu.
The thing about him, though, is that, like, when you watch the Frankie Edgar fight, you're like, hmm, okay, that can be shut down.
Like, that can be really shut down.
Like, he didn't have an answer when it was shut down.
So he's, which means, in my mind, that his game is so heavily favored, that looseness, openness, and kickness, kicking, crazy, you know, wild kicking, that it's imbalanced, right?
In the sense that he's got to put almost the same amount of effort to fighting off of his back.
If he developed an unbelievable guard game to match his unbelievable kicking game, holy shit.
The best kickers, that's one of the things that Pettis is realizing now.
Pettis has kind of stopped concentrating so much on wrestling.
And he said, what I've got to get back to doing is fighting.
And when I'm at my best, he was saying, using is striking.
And then when he goes to the ground, trying to submit people.
Don't try to stop takedowns.
Don't try to take people down.
Forget all that.
So going back to what got him there, you think about his Benson Henderson fight, won by Armbar, Gilbert Melendez fight, wins by Guillotine, takes his time on the feet, does all his creative shit on the feet, but if someone takes him down, he tries to submit him immediately.
He jumps on shit.
I think that's an interesting combination.
That's why I'm so interested in that fight with him and Tony, because Tony's so wild.
But his Darce game is so high level and he could get it from so many angles that really, I think the most dangerous thing would be, you know, Our guys that are just focused on one thing, and especially since he hits those Darces from every goddamn angle, you know, if he came out and just said, whatever happens, we're always looking for the Darce.
He was in trouble in that Lando Venata fight, and boom, he just put him in a Darce, and that saved the day, you know what I mean?
It's crazy that someone can figure out a way to do something that no one has ever done before in 2018. So he gets the headlock, and then he's just holding on, and then he slides it in deeper, and then this dude's fucked.
The way Barboza got mauled was scary, because halfway into the first round, Khabib's taking him down, and you see Barboza just taking a deep breath like this, like...
I wonder what's going to happen in that fight, man.
I just don't know whether or not Khabib's going to be able to close the distance without getting hit, whether Conor's going to be able to stay on the outside long enough, whether Khabib's going to come at him with reckless abandon the way he did with Edson Barboza.
He just stormed after Barboza, just walked him down.
Is he going to be able to do that with Conor, or is he going to get a clip coming in?
I mean, is he going to be able to fade that left hand?
Is he going to be able to stop that?
And if Conor could just keep him from taking him down a couple of times in the first round, just a couple of times, just enough to put a little bit of doubt, get a little bit of that shit-talking going, and land a couple of good punches.
This is one of those weird fights where I don't know what the fuck's going to happen, but I don't think we're going to see some crazy drawn-out five-round fight.
I definitely could be wrong, but I think we're going to see one person dominate.
Whoever figures out how to impose their game, whether it's Conor can dominate on the feed or Khabib can dominate on the ground.
Also, one of the reasons why, I don't know if you could look at that, if people are looking at it the right way, because I think Lando is way more talented.
I think in moments in his fights, he's just brilliant.
And I think then he gets tired sometimes and he has moments where he fades off and then moments where he's in these crazy wild slugfests.
Like the Bobby Green fight's a great example of that.
You watch the first round.
The first round, he looks smooth as silk, man.
I mean, he just looks fantastic.
He looks like a world beater.
But he tapers off.
He fades a little bit.
And I don't know what that is.
I'm not sure what's causing him to fade.
But I think that at his best, when he hits those real high notes like he did in the Tony fight, he's fucking dangerous, man.
Anybody who sleeps on Lando is in real trouble.
He's super athletic.
He does wild shit.
He's real creative.
Knocked out John McDessie with a fucking wheel kick.
I mean, whoa.
He does wild shit, man, and he moves good, dude.
He's got an interesting kind of way of moving, and he's not afraid to scrap.
And that not being afraid to scrap makes him dangerous, but also makes him vulnerable, which I think has cost him a little bit.
But I think a big one is the endurance.
You know, there's some people out there, like the guy that's working with TJ Dillashaw.
What is his name?
The guy down in Southern California, down near San Diego.
I'll text TJ. See, just Google TJ Dillashaw new strength and conditioning program.
These guys, like the Nick Cursons and the...
Sam Calavita Sam Calavita that guy was he if you watch the preparation videos for TJ getting ready for Cody Dillashaw you see him doing all his wild shit man everyone's doing all these explosive crazy movements just like back when We saw when BJ was at his best, when Marinovich was training him.
And, you know, Kurson comes from that school, too, you know, learning under the Marinovichs.
But that kind of crazy plyometric training, all this explosive shit that they're doing, box jumps and crazy things with medicine balls and slamming things and jumping back and forth and back and forth.
I think today, it's almost like when guys are getting ready for a fight, and this is one of the things that Nick Kurson has said, you already know how to fight.
Literally, everything should be focused on your gas tank.
You only have six weeks.
If you don't know how to fight, you're not going to learn in six weeks.
You know how to fight.
Six weeks should be just crazy gas tank work.
And when he gets guys like Dos Anjos, when he fought Cowboy, when he gets a hold of guys, and you see that style, like when Dos Anjos fought Pettis, when he's got that incredible kind of cardio, that's so hard to fuck with, man.
Well, in order to do that, you have to do this exercise where you put your feet, there's like a chain hanging and it's got like a weightlifting belt and you put your feet in your ankles and you start doing it on that and it just spins like this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's what he's he's really getting into Gymnastics right now Tony he's he's trying to take his Fighting well that was giant for George St. Pierre.
Yeah when GSP started getting into gymnastics, you know and Watching my daughter do it and watching like the amount of physical strength that it takes to do like Handsprings backflips and all that stuff all that it's all explosion and Being able to control yourself on the bars and the rings.
I mean, the amount of physical strength that you have to have to be able to do that, that applies directly to jiu-jitsu.