That training session resulted in an invitation to face the 6-foot-7, 295-pound Jon Hess at SuperBrawl 2 on Oct. 11, 1996. Hess had scored an impressive technical knockout against Andy Anderson at UFC 5. It would serve as Belfort’s professional mixed martial arts debut. At the weigh-in, Belfort was excited to see a number of Los Angeles Lakers were in attendance.
“I remember Shaquille O’Neal had just signed with the Lakers, and when he saw the name Carlson Gracie on my T-shirt, he bet a gold rolex with Magic Johnson, who asked me if I was crazy to fight that big guy,” Belfort said. “He accepted the bet. I’ll never forget about that.”
On the day of the fight, while Belfort was beginning his warmup in the dressing room, a representative from the promotion stepped forward with a request from Hess. According to Belfort, he wanted to propose special vale tudo rules, which would make attacks to the genitals and eye gouging legal.
“I said, ‘No, Carlson. I want to have a wife and kids someday,’” Belfort said. “Carlson immediately told me to shut up and told the translator to tell the guy that, besides vale tudo rules, we’d accept him bringing a knife to the ring. When the guy left the locker room, Carlson asked me, ‘Are you crazy?’ This guy’s afraid of you and wants to test your nerves. You’re going to kill him in less than a minute.’”
With more than six decades of vale tudo experience upon which to draw, Gracie’s words carried weight. Belfort entered the ring with confidence and knocked out Hess in 12 seconds.
2. John Marsh vs Sean Scott
The common theme is that the possibility of eye gouges raises the stakes so much that the eye-poke master gets utterly fucked up. Any more of these kinds of fights on record?
Back in the 1800’s there were these kinda fights, someone posted about them on the Combat list but it’s prob just urban legend bullshit.
The day after a particularly violent fight a spectator said to one of the combatants who had gotten his entire bottom lip bitten off “looks like ole chap got the better of ya eh?”
The ‘loser’ grimaced then slowly pulled an eyeball out from his pocket and showed it to his hecklers. There was still blood on his thumbnail which was grown at least two inches long and filed into a sharp triangle shape to easily extract eyeballs from their sockets during these no rules matches.
I remember when it happened, and again this was so long ago. There were all these “Vitor wasn’t supposed to take the fight” so it was never put on any of the Superbrawls tapes. I still have Superbrawl 1-4 on VHS…they had these 2 VHS tape sets.
But the whole “no rule” thing wasn’t really a thing. It was more of Vitor saying “ok, I’ll fight him with no rules.”
We used to talk about this over 20 years ago on here lol
Obviously Hess was going in there with the intent to eye gouge. He did it to Anderson in the UFC with no agreement. You can see him trying to poke Vitor’s eyes while he’s getting smashed.
You`re probably gonna have to rely on shit like Felony Fights.Looking back,I think that Rio Heroes was the closest thing to street fighting with the rule set & bare knuckles.You can see no rules written on the back of the referees shirt.
To tell you the truth,I don`t know about the eye gouging & biting.If you look close at 3:55 the fighter gets eye gouged and the referee appears to say that it is ok.
100% true
The decision to have a true No Rules was decided after weigh-in in a conference room at 24Hour Fitness Honolulu. Matt Hume, referee Steve English and I were in the room when Team Hess proposed and Carlson accepted
