Royce Gracie not a fan of WMMA

In January of 2011, outside the famed Beverly Hills restaurant Mr. Chow’s, a TMZ reporter engaged UFC president Dana White in some amiable banter asking, When are we going to see women in the UFC man?

A grinning White replied succinctly.

Never, said White. Never.

However, as White frequently says, Never say never. As is widely known, White saw star potential in Ronda Rousey and she became the organization’s inaugural women’s bantamweight champion, and eventually the biggest star in the sport, by far. In 2015, she was the third most searched for person on Google. #4 was Donald Trump.

But by 2014, White had radically altered his stance on women in MMA.

The best decision I ever made was to bring women in,” he said.

However, that sentiment is not universal. UFC Hall of Famer and Bellator MMA ambassador Gracie, whose initial exploits in the earliest form of the sport set the stage for all that was to come, offered a different response. Gracie was asked by sportscaster Joe Buck if he was a fan of WMMA.

“Nope,” he replied. “I’m not a big fan of it. I like the woman feminine. I don’t want to go home and get beat up. But hey, it’s a free country, they can do whatever they want.”

The clip comes from an appearance on the AT&T original series Undeniable with Joe Buck. New episodes air Wednesday’s at 8:00 p.m. The Royce Gracie episode aired on March 1, and can watched via at AT&T access ID here.

Curiously, mixed martial arts, the most macho of pursuits, has become the source of very progressive and widely-understood messages about sex roles, as well as positive images around LGBTQ issues.