Please, Royce Gracie, stop making it so hard to remember you fondly

It’s kind of amazing how much damage Royce Gracie manages to do to his own legacy, even years after the matter should have been settled. It’s gotten to the point where, even on a weekend when he’s not doing anything of note, when he shouldn’t be a story so much as a spectator, he still comes out looking bad.

It would be impressive if it wasn’t so depressing for those of us who he used to mean so much to.

This time it happened at the Metamoris 3 event in Los Angeles. At a gathering of grappling nerds so intense in their love of jiu-jitsu that they cheered half-guard sweeps like an MMA crowd cheers knockout blows, Eddie Bravo went 20 full minutes with another member of the Gracie clan, Royler, in a rematch of their 2003 match at the Abu Dhabi Combat Club.

Though Bravo won the first meeting via submission, the rematch ended in a draw, as tends to happen when evenly matched competitors meet in submission-only matches. Still, it was a fun match with plenty of swings back and forth. It left the crowd entertained, and should have left both sides with pride intact.

Enter Royce, the hero of the early UFC events, the man who has adamantly refused to accept a place of dignified refrain after doing his part to help MMA and jiu-jitsu find a foothold in North America.

The story goes that as Bravo was backstage getting his post-match vomit on, Gracie just had to work his way back there to offer a few unsolicited opinions. This was unwelcome, as you might imagine, not only because he had no business there in the first place, but also because, by his own admission, he hadn’t come to offer Bravo his congratulations on a closely contested match. He hadn’t even come just to say thanks for Bravo’s gracious post-match remarks. No, that’s not Royce’s style, apparently.

“I told him that I liked what he said after the fight, but didn’t like the fact that he always talked trash about Royler and my family,” Gracie told MMA Fighting. “He stood up and started yelling, so I also raised the tone of my voice and told him I didn’t like it.”

Imagine that. The guy who had just competed in a 20-minute match (which you, Royce, had nothing to do with) wasn’t in the mood for your attempt to refight old, boring battles? How surprising.

As an isolated incident, it just looks like bad judgment. The trouble is, this seems to have become Royce’s thing. When he’s not bashing the actual fighting members of his own family, he’s a little too eager to claim this overly critical elder statesman status on a sport that has changed drastically since his heyday in it. In the process, he’s tarnishing our sepia-toned memories of those early triumphs, which were important enough to the sport that most of us were even willing to forgive later transgressions, like the steroid bust that helped end his MMA career in 2007.

Royce Gracie was important to MMA and to the UFC. If I’m being honest, he’s a big part of the reason I took up jiu-jitsu, which in turn was a big part of the reason I got interested in MMA. I know I’m not alone in that, either. Plenty of American kids had never even heard of Brazilian jiu-jitsu until Gracie showed up on the scene at the very first UFC. Once we saw what he could do to bigger, stronger opponents, we wanted to learn all about the art that made this possible.

You could argue that he was mostly an avatar for the Gracie family at that point, and just about any other Gracie could have done as well or better than he did in those early UFC events. That may be true, but it’s beside the point.

It was Royce who showed up looking like a skinny guy in a gi, then tapped out one opponent after another before being carried out in triumph on the shoulders of his family. He did that. That’s his to keep. It’s an important part of MMA history that can’t be erased. I just wish he didn’t spend the years since then trying so hard to make us wish that it had been someone else.

Gracie’s time in the spotlight is over, and it has been for a long time. The sport that he excelled in back in the mid-90s is radically different from the one we watch today. Even the jiu-jitsu tournaments, like Metamoris, which you don’t see Royce competing in, are of a different breed than the ones of two decades ago.

Gracie might have played an important role in helping both sports get to where they are today, but that doesn’t give him the right to go puffing his chest out now, starting fights he has no intention of ever finishing.

The thing for Gracie to do is just stop. Stop creating needless drama. Stop trying to be the center of attention. Stop making it so difficult for us to remember you the way we want to, as the grinning, skinny Brazilian in the sweaty gi. We liked that guy. We respected him. We only wish we could say the same about all the versions of him that followed.