Outspoken Laimon comments on Gracies and more
The outspoken jiu-jitsu coach has lots of opinions. In this exclusive CP interview, he shares his thoughts on Eddie Bravo,…
The outspoken jiu-jitsu coach has lots of opinions. In this exclusive CP interview, he shares his thoughts on Eddie Bravo, awful MMA commentary, and the current “leather helmet” era of MMA. But first, the background of his falling out with the Gracies…
CP: So what was it that started this whole feud between you and the Gracies?
ML: I was training eight or nine hours a day, all day and I was starting to get pretty good. Then I went to the Pan-Ams and I saw guys there doing moves I had never seen before. I saw omoplatas and I saw [Vitor] Shaolin [Ribeiro] tap Robin Gracie when they were both brown belts and I was like, WOW! Shaolin had only trained something like three-and-a-half years. I went back to the academy and Rorian told me that I wasn’t ready for that kind of jiu-jitsu. I could understand. I had only been training like nine months at the time, and even though I had been training a lot, there’s a lot to adjust to techniques like that. The system takes a while to understand, but when you’ve got guys who are four-year blue belts and guys who have been training six or seven years and THEY’RE not ready, you start to wonder, When are they ready? Then you start wondering if it’s a cop out and they just don’t know this stuff or don’t want to learn it. By they, I’m talking about Rorian. Each Gracie is an individual and different. My main problem was with Rorian and how he did things. He’d say things like Everybody who left the academy is bad – they’re bad apples. Well, I started to think, Maybe the apples aren’t bad; maybe you’re a bad farmer.
There were all of these things going on. They wouldn’t let anyone compete in outside tournaments. If you just blindly followed everything they told you, everything was good, but if you ever questioned what was going on and used logic to see how things happened in the real world, you started to see that things were just a little bit different than what you were being told. I think that’s what happened. Even to this day I think that there are some shady sides to jiu-jitsu when guys are making a ton of money off of these tournaments, which is their goal – to make money off of Americans and every year you hear about guys getting screwed at the Pan-Ams, or screwed at the World [Jiu-Jitsu Championships] and they’re like What are you going to do about it? Guys threaten not to compete and they’re told, This year it will be different, and it never is. All these guys are making money off of their black belts and their video tapes and they charge these guys a lifetime’s worth of fees to compete even though people are coming to see them and they are giving back to the community. It’s just a whole lot of hoarding and greed going on in the sport. That’s not a positive environment to breed a sport in.
