Last month, an awestruck martial arts world watched the biggest
grappling event in the history of the sport. The incredible
production of the 2022 Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Fighting
World Championship reminded older fans of
Pride Fighting Championships, whose stateside
debut and antepenultimate numbered show,
Pride 32, coincidentally took
place in the same Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, 16
years before.
What many people may not know is that the idea to create the
“Grappling Olympics” sprang from the failure of
Pentagon Combat, a 1997
no-holds-barred event that ended in a riot and led to the sport
being banned in Rio de Janeiro for three years. In this report, I
recall that infamous event and how it directly impacted the
creation of ADCC, 24 years ago.
A Mysterious Pupil
In 1988, Nelson Monteiro, a coral belt under Gracie Barra founder
Carlos Gracie Jr., moved to San Diego, Calif., where he started
teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu in his garage but soon opened his own
gym. Shortly after
Royce Gracie
won the first
Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, a young
Arab graduate student named Tahnoon Bin Zayed decided to take a
week of classes from Monteiro.
“Tahnoon arrived with his secretary, the Englishman Guy Nievens,
and initially introduced himself as ‘Ben,’” recalls Monteiro, who
took Nievens for the boss and assumed that “Ben” was Nievens’
assistant, rather than the other way around. Monteiro only learned
his student’s true identity when, after completing his university
work,
Sheik Tahnoon made a stunning proposal: that Monteiro
return with him to the United Arab Emirates, and start teaching
jiu-jitsu—at his palace.
“I’ll never forget the day that ‘Ben’ came to me, revealed who he
was and invited me to move to Abu Dhabi. I was in love with the
lifestyle here in San Diego, my gym was doing really well, but the
proposal was undeniable. To make it even more difficult to say no,
Tahnoon offered me plane tickets to anywhere in the world every
three months,” recalls Monteiro, who moved to Abu Dhabi and started
to give private classes to Tahnoon.
After a few months of classes, Tahnoon, passionate about the UFC,
had the idea of staging a similar event in his country. “His father
didn't like the idea because he thought the NHB was too violent and
didn't want the UAE to be associated with it, so I suggested we do
the event in Rio, birthplace of vale tudo. He loved the idea and
that's how Pentagon Combat was born,” explained Monteiro.
Perhaps because Monteiro had been living outside Brazil since 1988,
without having experienced the historic Vale-Tudo do Grajau in
1991, which further intensified the animosity between jiu-jitsu and
luta-livre, he imagined that the rivalry between the two was over.
Thus he decided to accept the idea of Gracie Barra’s friends to put
Renzo
Gracie up against
Eugenio
Tadeu, luta-livre’s top icon. It turned out to be a very risky
bet.
Aside from that (almost literally) explosive main-event matchup,
however, it must be recognized that Monteiro put together a show
that lived up to Tahnoon’s aspirations. On that day, Sept. 27,
1997, Pentagon Combat graced the great mecca of jiu-jitsu events,
the Tijuca Tenis Clube gym, with great names like
Oleg
Taktarov,
Murilo
Bustamante,
Jerry
Bohlander,
Sean
Alvarez,
Marcelo
“Tigre” Eneas Dantas and
Ricardo
Morais.
Taktarov TKOs Alvarez in 52 Seconds
A year after being knocked out with an upkick by
Renzo Gracie
in Alabama, Taktarov came to Brazil to fight
Sean
Alvarez, a Monteiro purple belt and close friend of Sheik
Tahnoon who had debuted in Japan the previous year, beating
Yoji
Anjo. With 17 fights on his resume, including names like
Marco
Ruas,
Dan Severn,
Shamrock and Renzo himself, the Russian knew that Alvarez would try
to grab him, but he didn't even have time to try. Taktarov met
Alvarez’s first grappling attempt with an accurate hook that put
the big man down. “The Russian Bear” then closed out the fight with
a deadly sequence of crosses and straights at 52 seconds of the
first round.
It was not the fastest knockout of the night; Alvarez’s training
partner, 6-foot-8, 290-pound giant
Ricardo
Morais, needed only 17 seconds to knock out
Sergio
Muralha. And in Pentagon Combat’s most violent fight, Marcelo
“Tigre,” after being ground-and-pounded from the guard for almost
five minutes, managed to sweep, mount, take the back and submit
Jalmir “Buda”
Ferreira with a rear-naked choke.
Bustamante vs. Bohlander
Jerry
Bohlander’s controversial victory over
Fabio Gurgel
at UFC 11 made his matchup with
Murilo
Bustamante the most anticipated of the night. As expected, the
fight was very technical with both trying to take the other down,
until in an exchange against the fence, Bustamante managed to reach
Bohlander’s back, taking the American down as he did. The Lion’s
Den fighter got back to his feet, which is when Bustamante lured
the American to his open guard, controlled his wrists and surprised
him with a upkick (similar to what Renzo had done with Taktarov the
year before) knocking out Jerry at 5 minutes, 38 seconds. “Murilo
taught me a lot today. I think the UFC should have a 90kg
tournament to decide who is the best in the world. Me,
[Eugene]
Jackson, Bustamante and Gurgel,” Bohlander told me after the
fight.
Tadeu vs. Gracie: Luta-Livre Gets Revenge
There is a popular saying in Brazil: “The one who hits forgets, but
the one who gets hit doesn’t.” That proverb fits perfectly the
powder keg that was Pentagon Combat. For everything they went
through in and out of the ring on jiu-jitsu’s night of triumph at
Grajau in 1991, it was obvious that luta-livre would not pass up a
chance for revenge at Tijuca Tenis Clube, six years later. Putting
a member of the Gracie family to face the biggest leader of
luta-livre, a man who had fought at almost every major
confrontation between the two styles, without an absurd level of
added security apparatus, was a tragedy foretold.
“It was our payback for Grajau. The day before, I tried to get some
tickets with Robson Gracie, but he only gave me three, so I got
angry. I organized an army of 100 luta-livre psychopaths and we
invaded Tijuca Tenis Clube Gymnasium, we showed them how difficult
it is to fight under pressure,” luta-livre general
Hugo Duarte
told me the day after the event, explaining the invasion of Tadeu’s
fans two hours before the gym’s gates opened for Pentagon
Combat.
Gracie was 6 kilograms (13.2 pounds) heavier than Tadeu and was
considered the favorite, having defeated much larger opponents such
as Taktarov and
Maurice
Smith. In the early minutes of the fight, he gave the
luta-livre black belt a hard time, passing his guard several times,
achieving twice and nearly submitting him with a rear-naked choke.
Tadeu, showing his incredible heart and supported by the loud
cheering of the luta-livre faction, defended every attempt.
Eventually, Gracie began to tire while Tadeu seemed to grow
stronger. After dropping Gracie with a low kick, Eugenio started
kicking the legs of his grounded foe, who simply tried to recover
while on the floor. Gracie tried to get up again, but Tadeu put him
down again with another kick to the legs. Feeling the moment, the
luta-livre crowd went crazy and swarmed into the area around the
cage. The situation spun out of control when a luta-livre
representative kicked Gracie’s head through the fence and the fight
was stopped with just one minute to go in the 10-minute first
round.
The very tired Gracie got up and started walking around the cage
when another luta-livre representative reached over the top of the
cage and punched him. At that moment, the lights in the gym went
off and a general riot erupted between members of luta-livre and
jiu-jitsu, with hurled chairs flying. “I had never seen anything
like it in my life. It felt like a real war,” declared a distraught
Taktarov, who had finished his fight with Alvarez just minutes
earlier.
Police on the scene were completely lost in the middle of the
battle in the darkness. Photographers and journalists—myself
included—hid under the cage. To make matters worse, an unprepared
policeman thought that firing his gun in the dark gym would end the
confusion; the effect was the opposite.
“The guy who attacked Renzo was an idiot. I was so close to
knocking out the Gracie and luta-livre would finally get their
revenge,” an angry Tadeu complained later. Duarte believed that
Robson Gracie had been responsible for the blackout: “Why weren't
the lights turned off at first when Renzo was winning?” argued the
luta-livre head man. Renzo replied, “My dad was in the ring with me
when the chairs started being thrown into the ring. How could he
have turned off the light?”
Tahnoon Learns about the Riot on CNN
The next day, all the Brazilian press reported on the fiasco. Even
CNN international showed images of the “Brazilian Riot in a NHB
event,” and it was through a CNN report that the event’s own
patron, Sheik Tahnoon, learned of what had happened. The
consequences could not have been worse; after Pentagon Combat, the
mayor of Rio de Janeiro banned vale tudo events in the city.
However, it was his enormous frustration with the Pentagon’s
failure that led Tahnoon to want to create an event that would
unify the rules of grappling, allowing all styles to face each
other. “As soon as I returned to Abu Dhabi, Tahnoon started to talk
about the idea to unite grappling styles under the same rules,”
Monteiro.
The first Abu Dhabi Combat Club tournament took place less than one
year after Pentagon, with only a select group of invited athletes.
The event’s success led Tahnoon to invest more than $1 million in
the second ADCC, bringing more than 80 grapplers from all over the
world to Abu Dhabi in 1999. The even greater success of the second
edition turned the ADCC into the de facto world cup of grappling.
The event was held annually until 2001, when it began to be held
every two years. Today, 24 years after the first edition and
especially after this historic 14th edition in Las Vegas with the
presence of 14 greatest champions in the history of the event who
were inducted into a ADCC Hall of Fame, there is no doubt that ADCC
is recognized today as the “Olympics of Grappling.”