Gracie: I won’t underestimate Sakuraba
Renzo Gracie: “He has some dangerous leg locks. He’s a dangerous guy. I have some good guillotines, some good armbars. I have some good attacks.”
At Pride 10 in 2000, Kazushi Sakuraba defeated Renzo Gracie by breaking his arm in a kimura forcing the referee to stop the fight. Gracie was thirty three years old and Sakuraba thirty one years old.
This weekend the two will square off again, fourteen years later, but this time in a competitive jiu-jitsu match at Metamoris 5. For the forty seven year old jiu-jitsu legend, he is taking the match serious because he respects the skill and talent of his competitor:
“His game is focused on MMA, so it’s hard to train for someone like that,” he said. “He’s always dangerous. You can’t underestimate a guy like that. He’s dangerous from any position. He’s unorthodox, he doesn’t follow a clear line of attack. He does whatever goes in his mind, so that makes him unpredictable. It’s a challenge.
“I talked to a lot of guys I know that trained with him, and everybody talked about the quality of his grappling, that he’s dangerous all the time,” he continued. “It’s going to be a 20-minute war. It’s going to be fun.
“He has some dangerous leg locks. He’s a dangerous guy. I have some good guillotines, some good armbars. I have some good attacks.”