BJJ… Back in the Day
It was 1994 in my home state of New Hampshire,my father and I were one hour and a half into the Royce Gracie/ Dan Severn fight and the t.v. screen cut out!
Let’s back up a few hours first and give you some background as to how and why we were even watching. My father and I had been avid boxing and kickboxing fans since I could remember, watching USA Tuesday Night Fights every week and once in every third moon kickboxing would be featured in Friday nights. Wrestling was not offered, or even spoken about in my youth, and it was only in high school that I started to see guys running around in spandex uniforms throwing up everywhere! Anyway, I saw an advertisement on tv for this NHB (No Hold Barred) stuff and I was like, “Yeah, this would be fun to watch!”. I asked my dad and he was game so we ordered the fights.
It wasn’t until Royce stepped into the cage that I became intruiged. Until this point in the evening there was a ton of face pounding and teeth flying , and to admit, we even considered turning it off because it all seemed pretty excessive. But Royce changed that for us. Royce controlled the action unlike all the other fighters that night. He didn’t allow the fight to turn into a braul and didn’t try and go toe-to-toe with his opponent. Even though I had no idea what Royce was doing I knew he was being strategic and was biding his time for something, “but what”, I asked? I had seen him pull people to the ground and seen them squirm around as Royce just pinned them down, invariably the opponent turned onto his stomach and Royce made the person submit by some strange choke!
A couple fights later we are now an hour into the fight with Dan Severn that cuts out because of a PPV time limit. See, early NHB fights had no time limits and only a couple of rules, so PPV stopped covering the fight. To our surprise we found out that Royce had actually made Severn submit to some move called a “triangle Choke” from the his back. Well when we last saw Royce things didn’t appear to be going so well for him –Royce was on his back and Dan who about 2x a big as Royce was on top trying to beat Royce’s face in. But I found out later that this was Royce’s plan all along – to tire Dan out and make him make a mistake that he could capitalize on. I thought to myself that there really was something here that was both physically and mentally interesting – this martial art for realistically allowed a smaller person to defeat a larger adversary – cool!
—Next blog – how I got started doing BJJ years later.
