Blackzilians chief says team not going anywhere despite departure of coach and Rashad Evans

Blackzilians chief Glenn Robinson agrees with a lot of what Rashad Evans said about the team he founded. But the point on which he disagrees is the team’s future. He maintains it isn’t going anywhere.

“Blackzilians are going to continue, and we’re still going to be an incredible organization,” Robinson on Monday told MMAjunkie.

Evans on Monday indicated one of MMA’s most famous teams is a shell of its former self, telling “The MMA Hour” the team has broken up into a series of factions after its home gym was sold.

Robinson doesn’t dispute his role in a long period of uncertainty, but he said his actions were taken to preserve the Blackzilians’ longterm future. He said when a developer offered to buy him out on an $800,000 obligation to the team’s Jaco Hybrid Training Center in Boca Raton, Fla., this past fall, it offered a fresh start for the team.

Unfortunately, he said, the transition between a temporary facility and new state-of-the-art building didn’t come quickly enough, which prompted several key members of the gym to begin training elsewhere with longtime coach Henri Hooft. Robinson said when several months of meetings with Hooft on a new employment deal didn’t bear fruit, and Hooft continued to work with fighters in a separate facility, the writing was on the wall.

“I believe he already knew what his plan was,” Robinson said. “Five weeks ago, I knew we weren’t going to come to terms. So I needed to let the dust settle before I went and lost a bunch of money.”

Hooft announced Monday he’s started his own gym with Evans and several UFC vets joining a new facility (via Instagram):

Robinson wishes the coach well but said he’s going to change the way he does business moving forward.

“There’s some really good people, and for those people, I want to stay and see through what I started,” he said. “And there’s some people that I don’t have any negative feelings toward, but I just don’t want to work with. This allowed everyone to get their way.

“This business is run on emotion, so if you start making certain changes, it’s a domino effect. So when we realized we weren’t going to come to terms with (Hooft), we said let’s let the dust settle. I have no ill will toward anybody. I’ll just try to keep it small and bring in good people that fit our culture and are about team and not about how ‘I deserve.'”

When contacted by MMAjunkie, Hooft declined to comment specifically on Robinson’s interview and noted he’d said everything he wanted to say in his Instagram post.

As far back as December 2015, Robinson, the head of Authentic Sports Management and the owner of Iron Bridge Tools, has defended against claims of financial woes and an imminent departure from the MMA business. He acknowledged selling the MMA-themed brand Jaco after the UFC’s exclusive apparel deal with Reebok and also cited a health scare that prompted him to refocus his personal life. But he denied he was unable to pay his debts, and Hooft backed his story.

According to Evans, however, the team’s situation has worsened considerably over the past year. He said drama within the Blackzilians’ ranks was “worse than 10 high schools put together” and indicated Robinson had partially been at fault, saying he “wasn’t honest with himself about what he can and can’t do, and he didn’t say no enough.”

“Under normal circumstances, I would debate that,” Robinson said. “But over that past year, the majority that was true, because I was sick for four months going into the year and came back to nothing but problems.”

Robinson previously said his future in the MMA industry was tied to the fortunes of UFC light heavyweight contender Anthony Johnson, a longtime member of the Blackzilians. But he indicated there are other reasons to stay in the sport.

“Some of the guys I’m very close with, like Anthony. I’m going to stay in this sport because I care about them,” he said. “And there were people I’m not close with – they had this air of, ‘I deserve,’ not, ‘I should earn.’ I had young guys asking me for cars that weren’t even in the UFC. I got fed up with it.

“So there were a lot of people I didn’t really want to work with anymore, and this allowed me to come in and clean house. I would have liked it to have worked out with Henri, but it didn’t work out.”

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