blabbermouth - HotSteppa - I remember this fight and this moment clearly. (I used to own the complete VHS tapes that were sold back in the day).
Rickson was not really frustrated, he was patient. He was trying to flip his leg over, and bring his leg close to opponent’s hips (as he did) without taking pressure off the upper body. and then just go right into mount (what he did). Roger Gracie does something similar.
The technique was completely known back then and done forever, but wasn’t called the “lock-down”. I’m sure thogh, he hadn’t encountered it in a while. I know Pedro Sauer used to show escapes to this in late-90s-ish.
It's funny you say that because just recently watched some old BJJ tapes from the nineties and was really surprised. People say they didn't do footlocks back then, but several of the tapes showed toe holds, achilles locks, heel hooks and kneebars. Machado and Sperry showed them. At least one other big name guy did as well.
Can you shed some light on this mystery for me? It sounds like you've been involved in BJJ for several decades.
Yeah, my first BJJ was in 1993! I was around then and people DEFINITELY did leg-locks. But they were somewhat frowned upon as “dirty” techniques, done as more of a “last resort” in Brazil. Personally, I don’t think many people in BJJ trained them extensively or had the knowlege, and so it was an easy way to avoid guys like Samboists using their extensive (and complicated) set-ups in tournaments. But basic leg-locks were found in old Judo, and have been around forever.
But single leg attacks here and there in old BJJ are nowhere near the cohesive systems that are found in Sambo, or practitioners like Roy Harris were using 20 years ago, and modern, recent developments. In fact,I clearly remember as I mentioned in another post, Roy Harris coming on sites like these in the late 1990s, and repeatedly getting shot-down in arguments over the effectiveness of leg-locks in BJJ. A lot of BJJers were fairly close-minded back in the day (but by no means all of them).
But they were all there from the beginning -footlocks, kneebars, heelhooks, figure-fours, etc. They were NOT BJJs bread and butter techniques.
According to Roy Harris, the now famous story of Samboist Nikolai Baturin dropping into the Gracie Academy mid-1990s and catching Royce in a footlock and Royce refusing to tap to the pain and pressure, and eventually getting a choke on the Samboist, (gi chokes are not permitted in Sambo). He also said that back then, leg-locks were very rare at the Gracie Academy and rather amateur-hour. I don’t doubt it, I mean, BJJ was never known for leg-lock attacks.
I remember reading abot Samboist and early UFC veteran, Oleg Taktarov tells of dropping into the Gracie Academy and stating that he could have caught a bunch of them in leg-locks but didn’t use the leg-locks out of respect (or something to that effect). IIRC, Rorion got Pedro Sauer to grapple himP= and it was that said that Pedro stated that despite his best efforts, he couldn’t submit Oleg in a rear-choke and respected Oleg’s skills immensely. I don’t think Oleg would tap an armbar he was in either.
I wonder if any old Gracie Academy guys on here could give the details better.