John Danaher on Making Jiu-Jitsu More Palatable to Watch

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. 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 good. It's great commentary. 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 has done an amazing job of showcasing elite grapplers, there's something weird about their score system. So the first, was it first five minutes? There's no score points. 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, 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 that you did see, the most entertaining thing you can do is to push the action towards submission holds. And submissions function and grab in the same way a knockout punch does in boxing. And 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, it was the idea of submission. I think that's the only appeal. I don't think you could ever say anybody, I find it appealing to win on points. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Or even worse on advantage. Yeah. You just wrestle if you want to do that. When you look at jiu-jitsu, what makes it remarkable is the idea that it's a form of grappling with the outcome as 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 are at sports, the mechanism by which they win, and judo's case, the e-pond throw, they do have submissions in judo, but they're much less emphasized. And in wrestling at pin, they're not as decisive. 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 in one. 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 ruleset 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 had their losses. 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 the 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. Like, 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. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. 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