Alexandre Paiva with his son, now a brown belt world champion / Personal archive photo, 2011
Team Alliance, under the captainship of Master Romero Jacaré, won the World Championship yet again this year, but not all the school’s teachers are 100% pleased with what they saw in the Long Beach Pyramid on the first week of June.
That’s the case with Alexandre “Gigi” Paiva, who witnessed his son return home to Rio the brown belt champion of the world in the featherweight division. But that wasn’t reason enough for the Jiu-Jitsu professor to be fully satisfied with what he saw.
“I’m happy about my son winning the title. But I noticed that Victor was the only little guy who won playing on top, and I’m not just talking about brown belts. In the other finals—forgive me if I’m being unfair to anyone—I only saw guys with their buts on the ground trying to win. Horrible, in my opinion,” said Paiva.
“The way I see it, Victor showed it’s still possible to win by playing on top. And he won in fine form, since he finished all his opponents except [Gianni] Grippo,” he explained.
Watch the featherweight brown belt final between Victor Genovesi and Gianni Grippo. For the complete results from the IBJJF World Championship, click here.
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I’d say Gigi is right the only guys in recent memory who don’t willingly pull guard are Roger, Demente, Xande/Saulo Ribero and Rodolfo. To find more you gotta go back ten years to Margarida and Arona days. Kinda sad really. Guess guard got so fancy and cool looking people forgot how to pass. I remember a time when pulling guard was shunned upon.
and people would rather learn to play advantages and berimbolo than spend time learning takedowns.
[...] graciemag.com Team Alliance, under the captainship of Master Romero Jacaré, won the World Championship yet again [...]
Happy to see, that Gigi had the opportunity to say this in a popular magazine. It would be good for Brazililian Jiu-Jitsu as a sport and as a martial art that there would be more emphasis on takedowns and playing on the top. This could be helped with some fixing in the sport BJJ rules. Naturally, not to take away the great importance of the ability to fight from the bottom, but not to see fighters just to sit down and without practicing takedown skills.