Name: John Danaher on Making Jiu-Jitsu More Palatable to Watch
Uploaded: 2021-05-28T17:39:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'John Danaher on Making Jiu-Jitsu More Palatable to Watch' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'John Danaher on Making Jiu-Jitsu More Palatable to Watch' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-28. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- This idea, this concept, is so fantastic to me,
to take elite grapplers and pay them for matches
and then stream it online and Flow Grappling is doing this
and they're very successful, a lot of jiu-jitsu people
are tuning into these things and it's really become a hit.
- A true key in the development of any sport
is some kind of organization which showcases it.
For mixed martial arts it was the UFC
and Grappling always struggled with the idea
of showcasing the skills of the athletes.
There were local shows, when you and I started jiu-jitsu,
there were crazy local shows where people would just
informally come in and compete against each other
but there was nothing that had any kind of overall vision
or sustained program over time and that I believe
is what Flow Grappling is trying to do here.
They're trying to give something, a grappling version
of what the UFC has done for mixed martial arts
and the athlete pay is improved dramatically
over earlier years and athlete exposure
is massively improved.
So it's a very encouraging thing.
- And the production is excellent.
- Yes.
- It's really good.
It's a great commentary and great--
- It's something where you could take someone
who didn't know much about grappling, a friend of yours,
invite them over and watch it together and they'd be like,
"Hey, that's an impressive sport."
As you said, the production looks like it's a legitimate sport
as opposed to going to the local high school on a Saturday
and watching you compete in that fashion.
- Well, one of the things that's made the sport more palatable
is the approach that your athletes take and many other athletes are following
suit
is that it's a very submission-based approach instead of just trying to score
points.
Because I think there's been a problem with these rule sets where, I mean, even
though Abu Dhabi's done an amazing job of showcasing elite grapplers, there's
something weird about their score set systems.
So the first five minutes, there's no points scored?
- That's correct, yes.
- And then the next five minutes, you score points.
So you get guys stalling out for five minutes, so you almost guarantee a boring
five minutes
unless you have some sort of Marcelo Garcia attacker who just dives on
submissions and goes
after it right away, which is not the norm.
The norm is points-based guys who are just trying to win.
That's correct.
As a general rule, you know, athletes are smart and they want to win.
So they will, as a general rule, always try to find the least risky way of attaining
victory
and doing the minimum amount of work in order to get to a win.
And yet the spectators are demanding something else, they're demanding
entertainment.
And in the sport of jiu-jitsu, the most entertaining thing you can do is to
push the action towards
submission holds.
And submissions function in grappling the same way a knockout punch does in
boxing.
It's the most desired result.
It's also the most impressive result.
If you think, Joe, back to when you first started jiu-jitsu, what was its
primary appeal?
Well, I think for the overwhelming majority of practitioners of jiu-jitsu was
the idea of submission.
- I think that's the only appeal.
- Yeah.
- I don't think you could ever say to anybody, "I find it appealing to win on
points."
- Yeah.
- It's ridiculous.
- Or even worse on advantage.
- Yeah.
Just wrestle if you want to do that.
- Yeah.
- When you look at jiu-jitsu, what makes it remarkable is the idea that it's a
form of grappling where the outcome is determined in a way which it's
understandable to anyone.
It's surrender.
You make someone surrender to you.
Like, as impressive as judo, wrestling, or sports, the mechanism by which they
win,
in judo's case, the e-pon throw, they do have submissions in judo, but they're
much less emphasized.
And in wrestling a pin, they're not as decisive.
Like, you know, it's easy to imagine someone who got pinned with their
shoulders on the mat
for three seconds, but came back to win the fight.
That's not a difficult thing to conceive of.
It's easy to conceive of someone who got thrown pretty hard and still kept
fighting and won.
But when you surrender, that's you saying, "I quit.
It's over."
And that's the most definitive form of victory possible in any form of
grappling.
And that, I think, was the true appeal of jiu-jitsu.
The further you get away from the idea that jiu-jitsu is about control leading
to submission,
the less interesting the sport becomes.
And we must do as much as possible to push athletes towards that expression of
jiu-jitsu.
Don't just win by the minimum amount to get the job done, but go the extra
distance and try to win by submission.
Now, you just mentioned the name of Marcelo Garcia.
He was one of a handful of athletes.
You see Hodger, Gracie was another, who at a time when the rule set didn't
demand it,
went out of their way to go the extra distance and fight from beginning to end
for submission.
And what do you notice about those athletes?
They're legends.
They're legends.
They're loved to a degree, which all those other athletes, and don't forget
they both lost.
Okay, they both had their losses.
They weren't undefeatable.
But they're legends because of the way they fought as much as for the victories
themselves.
Yeah, they represented true jiu-jitsu.
They represented the ideal of control to submission.
And there's a sense in which athletes have to understand if you want to build a
brand in jiu-jitsu,
you can't just go with that minimalist approach of do enough to win, be happy
with that.
And you have to go into expressing the ideal of jiu-jitsu.
Now, the natural response on the part of many organizers is to try and create
rules
which force athletes against their will to go the extra distance.
That was the intention in ADCC, the Abu Dhabi approach.
They took away points in the first five minutes so that athletes would be
encouraged to go for submission holds.
Now, some of them were, but as you correctly pointed out, most of them weren't.
They actually used it not as a means of encouraging submission but actually
avoiding any form of contact
and making for a very boring first five minutes in many cases.
So what I truly believe is that there's never going to be a rule set which
forces athletes towards submission.
The way it's going to change is through culture.
It's got to come, I believe, from coaches creating a culture where athletes
strive for a higher ideal in jiu-jitsu,
which is control to submission rather than minimum advantage or points to score
a win and be happy.
It's got to come from a training room culture rather than rules.
A good athlete can always game the rules to get the minimum method of victory.
There's always a way.
Just as a lawyer will find any interpretation of a law in order to get the
result they seek,
so too an athlete can find any interpretation of the rules to get to the
minimum win.
So it's not going to come from rules.
They've tried in the past and it just hasn't worked.
In fact, it's actually had some negative connotations as you pointed out.
So it's got to come from a training room culture and that's what I try to do
with my squad.
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