Grand Theft Gracie: Did Bellator Steal Another UFC Icon Just Because It Could?
The new guard at Bellator MMA made another decidedly old-school acquisition this week, inking UFC O.G. Royce Gracie as its latest “national brand ambassador.”
Raise your hand if you saw that one coming.
Anybody?
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No, you wouldn’t have.
After all, Gracie hasn’t fought since 2006-07, and in his last two professional bouts, he got smashed by Matt Hughes at UFC 60 and then tested positive for steroids following a win over Kazushi Sakuraba at Dynamite!! USA. His more recent public interactions have been limited to smiling for the camera during UFC events and a backstage altercation with Eddie Bravo after Metamoris 3 in March.
So, uh, what exactly is Bellator’s play here? What does it want with Gracie, who turns 48 in December, when it already has so many other retired (or soon to be retired) MMA stars under contract?
Gracie joins a lengthy list of UFC greats who’ve crossed the aisle to join up with the competition late in their fighting lives. Even more than SpikeTV's signing of 51-year-old Randy Couture last February, however, bringing Gracie on board feels like a purely symbolic gesture.
Perhaps one that's meant to show that Bellator, its broadcast partners at SpikeTV and its corporate overlords at Viacom have not yet begun to fight.
It's not so much a step forward for Scott Coker and Co. as it is a shoulder bump to the UFC as the two organizations pass each other in the high school cafeteria. Just a little love tap to let the boys in Las Vegas know Bellator is still out there. Still with a little bit of money in its pocket.
Prior to this week, Gracie remained arguably the most iconic fighter in UFC history. His family helped start the company and pioneered the MMA pay-per-view model as a way of popularizing the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu brand. To have a guy like that suddenly and rather unceremoniously defect, it has to mean something.
For one thing, it means Bellator made him the more financially appealing offer, which is kind of a sad commentary in its own right. And hey, if the officials at Bellator are willing to celebrate (read: pay) Gracie in a way the UFC is not, kudos to them. And if Gracie is willing to sacrifice his relationship with his former employer to do it, more power to him.
In the wake of their departures, the UFC has done its best to paint over the memories of guys like Couture, Tito Ortiz and Frank Shamrock. That doesn’t seem possible with Gracie, unless the promotion means to completely disavow its own origin story.
But while Gracie was tremendously important to the UFC’s history, it remains a mystery what he'll bring to Bellator in the present tense. According to a statement released by the organization on Tuesday, Gracie will “host seminars, be involved in autograph and promotional appearances, as well as aiding in the international expansion of Bellator around the world.”
That’s all fine and good, but piggybacking on Gracie’s image can only take Bellator so far. There’s no serious way it can position itself as the real heir to his greatness, and it’s been so long since he actually accomplished anything of substance, his worth to a company where he has no history feels speculative at best.
Clearly, he’s more limited as a spokesman than Couture, Shamrock or even Ortiz. Spike could give him the documentary treatment, but it doesn’t own the rights to any of his fights. It could hand him some sort of reality show—which seems to be Spike’s go-to move, anyway—but early tries at doing that for other guys (see: Fight Master, Gym Rescue) haven’t exactly been stellar.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to see Gracie show up on Impact Wrestling, ball-peen hammer in hand.
So, what else does Gracie do that is of any value to Bellator? Shake hands and kiss babies, as the above statement suggests? Stand quietly in the audience as a Spike graphic trumpets him as an “MMA Hall of Famer”? Provide some sage sound bites for Emanuel Newton’s upcoming title defense against Linton Vassell?
No, unless Bellator is about to spring some master plan on us, my guess is that it signed Gracie out from under the UFC’s nose merely to prove it could. Now the man who first brought MMA to the American masses, who first popularized those three little letters and first got his hand raised inside the Octagon, doesn't work there anymore.
Maybe at this point Gracie is just a metaphor, but having him around still has some meaning.
At some point, though, it'd be nice to see Bellator move beyond symbolism. We already knew the company had the wherewithal to smuggle away the relics of the UFC’s past.
If it really wants to make a splash, it needs to steal a piece of MMA’s future.
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