Wrestling in BJJ

I have been thinking about wrestling and BJJ a good bit since my post on American Jiu Jitsu a couple of weeks ago.

To me wrestling and BJJ aren't two separate things - they are both grappling. Where I train we have a weekly class that is just takedowns (as well as working them in other classes throughout the week). Sometimes the takedown of the day could be classified as more wrestling sometimes more judo oriented, but to deny that there is a ton of overlap between the two is just plain silly.

What also strikes me as silly is to think that these takedowns are not a part of BJJ. In BJJ we like to claim that most fights end up on the ground (true) - but they usually wind up on the ground because somebody A took somebody B down (not because somebody B pulled guard). To think that a BJJ player wants to be the guy on the bottom in this scenario is ridiculous. In a fight you almost always want to be on top and be the aggressor (unless you are disengaging to run away).

So in my mind takedowns and takedown defense are an inherent part of BJJ regardless of how pure or old school somebody's BJJ is.  And thinking that incorporating wrestling is a new idea because of wrestlers currently making a good showing in MMA tells me that a lot of folks out there (students and teachers both) don't know about the history of their art. The "old guard" of BJJ practitioners always thought BJJ was the "best fight" (and they proved it on the mat/in the ring but they never thought it was the "only fight"). If something worked they were all over trying to understand it - both to defend against it and to use it themselves.

I love this quote from Renzo about how Rolls especially liked to color outside the lines - "Rolls (...) was the guy who actually completely changed jiu jitsu in Brazil. He started training a lot of wrestling, a lot of judo, he started training Sambo, and he was able to incorporate all that into jiu jitsu. He was the one responsible for all the evolution we have today. He was the pioneer of all that change."

If there is a test for a "true" BJJ school it should be "are they open to continuously learning and innovating, committed to the idea of understanding what works," OR "are they closed to new ideas - thinking that they must be inferior because they weren't invented here." You guess which answer is correct (you have a 50/50 chance of getting it right :-)).

Hopefully BJJ will continue to evolve based on what gets the job done (rather than devolve into another McDojo martial art).