Posers and MMA and clothing!

It was cool when the sport first started and having a shirt that said Gracie or Tapout was something that was rare. You either had to be training in MMA or had trained. If you saw someone wearing a Gracie or Tapout shirt you immediately walked up to him and started a conversation. It didn’t matter how long he had been training or even how good he was; the main thing was that he trained. If he did train, you had an instant brotherhood formed with the person no matter what team he was from. The Brotherhood was formed because you both had endured countless battles that included a lot of physical, emotional and spiritual pain that daily training gives you. If you had never trained before and happened to be listening to two MMA guys talk, it sounded like they were talking in some kind of coded language.

Our sport was so small back then that at the time there were only 2 degrees of separation from every BJJ and MMA instructor in the USA. It didn’t matter who the Instructor was, you knew someone who had trained with him. There were only a handful of legitimate Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt Instructors when I started. On the East Coast we only had 5 Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belts. Gracie was the name in MMA; Royce had shown the world that Gracie or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was superior to all other arts. So if you were an MMA fighter and not training in BJJ you were taking a big risk stepping into the cage.

So you get the idea when I say that seeing a Gracie or Tapout shirt being worn by someone was cool -- there were very few posers! These days, the sport has become so popular that you no longer know if someone is a fan or if he actually trains. Even if the guy doesn’t train but he says he does, it is hard to tell if he is lying or not. If he has watched a few UFCs he has probably picked up on the lingo and can even rattle off some names and training camps. So determining if the guy is a poser is becoming harder and harder.

I think that having posers out there is great. They are supporting our sport and educating more people about it. We should not care if they are walking around with MMA clothing on and acting like they are tough; they are acting like that for the chicks. Most guys become posers because they are not tough or good enough to do whatever they are posing as.

Example-

When I was in the Military and deployed in Arizona, I remember some of my Marines telling some girls we had met that they were Naval Aviators. The girls really dug it and since the Marines had all watched “Top Gun” at least 20 times while we were on deployment they could perpetrate the role. I was a SGT at the time and the Marines were all working for me. When I asked why they didn’t tell them the truth, they said that being an aviator was so much cooler than what they did. Some of the Marines went as far as buying T-shirts with Naval Flight Squadrons on it and wearing the gold Ray Bans that Tom Cruise wore.

It was the chicks’ responsibility to find out if they were pilots or posers. Navy Seal, Delta Force, Marine Recon, SWAT, Sniper are some other occupations that get a lot of posers. So you should feel great that there are guys out there who think the sport you train in is worth the poser status!