 Brown Belt
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Boston, MA, USA
Posts: 3,388
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My 2007 ADCC Recap
Got to Princeton, New Jersey around 6pm and checked into our room at the Homewood Suites. This place was awesome and pretty cheap. They have internet only, non-refundable rooms for $85 a nice. It had a full kitchen (a dishwasher and dishes even!), a couch, desk, free internet, and a BIG LG HDTV.
For some reason I woke up at 6am and couldn't go back to sleep so I finished reading Gene Lebell's biography. Good book, but very scattered. We partook in the free continental breakfast, which decent as far as those go. There was a big track and field meet going on at Princeton University and there were tons of 6'+ ultra skinny girls wearing tiny spandex shorts eating all the free sugary pastries. Pretty funny. We swam in the pool for a bit then made our way to Sovereign Bank Arena, which was about 20 minutes down Route 1.
Parking across the street from the Arena was $6. We picked up our tickets and entered... right in front of the entrance was the official ADCC merch table and slightly to the right was the Koral/Jiujitsu Pro Gear merch table. All the official ADCC shirts were lackluster. I really like both ADCC logos (the one with the bulbous letters and the one with the sharp skinny letters) but the back of all the shirts they had were plastered with advertiser logos. They were selling DVDs as well, Bruce Buffer kept mentioning that they were “buy two get one free.” After one of the announcements a guy sitting behind me said “but I don't even want one!” He also pronounced Koral, “Krr-All.”
Gameness had a table with all their gear, gis, VT shorts, board shorts, tshirts, hoodies etc. I ended up getting my girlfriend a size 1 kids gi. Sniper Submissions also had a table that didn't have anything interesting. Cut Throat Fightwear (Fightgear?) had a bunch of shirts and some nice ADCC shirts, but, of course, their logo was plastered all over it. NAGA had a big display with some of their shorts and a TON of shirts and hoodies all of which had their hideous logo. There was a booth for “Female Fighters Against Domestic Violence” that was raffling a very ugly Chuck Liddell lithograph... their shirts and stuff looked horrible as well. There were some tables set up for Rags and Dollamur but neither of them showed up. There was a big booth for some company whose name I can't remember that had a lot of really generic looking shirts and was selling 1001 Submissions and the Bas Rutten Big Books of Combat. OTM had a pretty big display with a ton of Tapout merch and their own brand of board shorts, lots of shirts, rashguards, etc. During the second day they had some Lucky Gis. Koral had all their gis, shorts, and rashguards. I tried on an A2 jacket and it was too big... which is weird because the A1 jacket I had before was massively small. I also tried on their board shorts in size large. Way too big! So I tried them on in medium and they fit great... very strange considering the mediums I ordered at the same time I ordered the gi were extremely tight.
They got started on time with Bruce Buffer doing his shtick... I wonder how much he got paid compared to his half-brother in Vegas that same night? They played some video promos on the big screen, including a wonderful Tapout one with two fatties beating the crap out of each other... “bad for the sport?” You bet.
Things got going right away with the big guys. Bruce Buffer started to have trouble with the name right away... he was definitely stumbling all day. They worked their way down the weight divisions pretty quickly. There were four mats and they were almost always in use. The crowd popped big for Rolles, Kyra, Renzo, Saulo, and of course, Marcelo Garcia. The two times Marcelo came out, there was something weird about him that I couldn't quite pinpoint. Whenever Tetsu Suzuki walked to the ring he wore a silver outfit with a silver alien mask and waved a fan with the Japanese flag on it. Barrett Yoshida, Drew Fickett, and Kurt Pellegrino got decent reactions too.
A lot of people were confused/disappointed about Igor Vovchanchyn and Joe Stevenson not being there.
Throughout the day Bruce Buffer was announcing various attendees of the event... Royler, Josh Barnett (who was cornering all but one of the female Japanese grapplers), and Wallid Ismail.
Now... I'm going to say a little something about Gabe Ruediger. Most of you have either seen or heard about Gabe on last weeks TUF. Well, Gabe was there for both days, walking around the floor. He looked very chubby. When he was on the show, with a shirt on, he looked pretty normal, but he was definitely sporting a belly and the beginnings of some sexy man boobs. The worst part is that he didn't show any interest in the grappling (apart from about 45 minutes during the absolute tournament on the second day) and he was eating like crazy. He'd just come out to schmooze with various people, then walk backstage again.
Mike Fowler was on fire... his match with Renzo was lackluster, but his match with Saulo is definitely worth watching. Fabricio Werdum had a boring match with Elvis Sinosic... in fact, every match that Werdum had all weekend was boring. Marcelo, of course, was incredible...
They put the women on last and a lot of people left early, which is unfortunate because they missed some good matches with Kyra Gracie, Megumi Fujii, Hitomi Akano, and Penny Thomas. During one match Fujii got warned for giving tips to a grappler on her team, so her and Barnett switched places. Toward the end of the day, there was a fight near where the grapplers enter the arena involving two guys I had seen walking around the floor. No idea who they were. One of the female grapplers though was flipping out and had to be restrained. It took three cops to subdue the instigator. When I was leaving the arena I walked by Rolles talking on his cell phone. His head is HUGE!
We got some food, messed around in Trenton for a while then headed back for the hotel. My girlfriend went to sleep right away. When I got in bed she sat up, looked at me, reached out her hand and pushed on my forehead twice then said, “I'm trying to find you something that's like jam!” I started laughing and said, “What?” She laid back down then said, “I'm just trying to follow the rules.”
Hahaha...
The next day was great... Bruce Buffer was definitely more focused than he was the first day. There seemed to be a lot organizational errors during the second day though. Grapplers taking a long time to show up (Rolles and Kyra were really bad at this), moving grapplers to different corners/different mats. The finals of the women's absolute tournament happened on one of the end mats for absolutely no reason, the other three mats weren't even being used.
Buffer announced Wallid Ismail again, then immediately announced Ryan Gracie, which got a decent laugh out of the crowd. Later on he announced “local hero” Mario Yamasaki. Mario Sperry was there, but I don't think Buffer announced him. I saw Wallid walking around the concourse... a little while later I saw Ryan, who looked huge... much more muscular than when he was fighting in PRIDE and I realized something... there are three options here, and I haven't determined which is correct... Wallid Ismail and Ryan Gracie are either... brothers, father and son, or the same person. They look remarkably similar.
Marcelo came out and tore apart his division... again I noticed what I noticed the day before. There was something weird about his entrance. In any case, he was always ready to go. The second his name was announced he was walking out from the back. Very respectful and always smiling.
Wallid Ismail and Mario Yamasaki had an animated conversation at about the mid-point of the day.
The matches were all pretty great. Werdum had a terrible match, and the larger female grapplers had some snoozers. There was one whose name I can't remember was constantly grabbing the hair of her opponents, a lot of people in the crowd weren't happy with this. After both of Marloes Coenen's matches she had some sort of weird seizure type thing. The first match, she got submitted with a choke so people thought I was just residue from that. She kept on buckling over, like she was going to pass out. After the second match, which she won, she chewed a piece off her mouthpiece and spit it out by the mat. It was very creepy. She may have just been ultra-gassed... people's bodies do some weird things when they have absolutely no energy.
The crowd was a little more ornery, at several points booing tremendously and at another everyone started yelling “points!” I believe this happened during the superfight when Roger Gracie scored a takedown and for some reason it took like 30 seconds for them to score it.
Bruce Buffer announced Marcelo Garcia vs. Rolles Gracie in the absolute division and the whole place went crazy. Then he announced that a mistake was made and changed Gracie's opponent. Fortunately, later in the day, Marcelo did fight Rolles. The end of this match was very weird... it looked like Gracie tapped and then grabbed his arm, like he was injured. Something strange happened and the judge made them stand-up and was going to restart them on their feet. The whole place started booing and Garcia's cornerman started tapping in an animated fashion to the judges... just as the action was going to start again, Garcia walked over to Renzo, and talked to him for a few seconds. Renzo got up, went over to the judges, talked for a while, and then they announced that Marcelo had won.
Last edited by amphibious; 05-08-2007 at 03:09 PM.
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