During a recent appearance on The MMA Hour, former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans said the Blackzilians had splintered. The fighter did, however, stop short of saying the team was gone. In a conversation with Steven Marrocco for MMAjunkie, founder Glenn Robinson said reports of the team death have been greatly exaggerated.
Blackzilians are going to continue, and we’re still going to be an incredible organization, said Robinson.
Robinson said an offer for the team’s facility provided an opportunity for a new start, but there was a delay in building a new site, which forced the use of a smaller facility. Negotiations with coach Henri Hooft were unsuccessful, and he left to start his own facility. A number of fighters followed him.
I believe he already knew what his plan was, said Robinson. Five weeks ago, I knew we weren’t going to come to terms. So I needed to let the dust settle before I went and lost a bunch of money.
There’s some really good people, and for those people, I want to stay and see through what I started, he said. And there’s some people that I don’t have any negative feelings toward, but I just don’t want to work with. This allowed everyone to get their way. … I’ll just try to keep it small and bring in good people that fit our culture and are about team and not about how ‘I deserve.’
Some of the guys I’m very close with, like Anthony [Johnson]. I’m going to stay in this sport because I care about them. And there were people I’m not close with – they had this air of, ‘I deserve,’ not, ‘I should earn.’ I had young guys asking me for cars that weren’t even in the UFC. I got fed up with it.
So there were a lot of people I didn’t really want to work with anymore, and this allowed me to come in and clean house. I would have liked it to have worked out with Henri, but it didn’t work out.
Evans described an emotionally charged group, “worse than ten high schools put together, a bunch of gossiping.”
Robinson said he had been out for some time with medical issues and returned to find a situation much like Evans described.
Under normal circumstances, I would debate that, Robinson said. But over that past year, the majority that was true, because I was sick for four months going into the year and came back to nothing but problems.
