THE LEGEND ON UFC I
After two decades of covering combat sports, there are few interviews that can make you nervous. Talking to Royce Gracie was one of them. Luckily, when I spoke to him for the first time before he announced his return to the UFC to face Matt Hughes in 2006, he couldn’t have been more gracious, and in subsequent chats, the man who basically created this sport has always been generous with his time, recollections, and knowledge. But with a family full of jiu-jitsu legends, why was he chosen for UFC I?
“It was just the right time,” Gracie told me in 2006. “I was the right size. I wasn’t bulked up and big and I didn’t look very scary, so to speak. It was just the right timing for me.”
And the wrong timing for everyone else. Yet despite the fact that the sport and its athletes have evolved since 1993, Gracie’s accomplishments in the early UFCs haven’t dimmed in the slightest, mainly because he was fighting in unknown situations every night out against multiple opponents. In UFC I alone, he fought three times in a single night.
“It was very different from the way it is now,” recalled Gracie. “You draw the fighter right before the fight and your strategy is done right there on the spot. You train for everybody. When you’re in training camp you train for a big guy, little guy, fast guy, slow guy, heavy guy, strong guy, everybody. So when you get an opponent, you say, ‘okay, that’s the guy – here’s the strategy for him. He’s a boxer, so I’m gonna shoot.’ It was a lot more on the fly. You have to be prepared for everybody. Now, you get an opponent, you know who he is, you have the footage, and you train for him. It’s different.”
It sure is, but while many things have changed, the respect for the legendary Gracie has never wavered. And never will.
