If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. (TS Eliot, Four Quartets)

Saturday night at Metamoris 3 Eddie Bravo and Royler Gracie ended their long-awaited rematch in a “draw.” This is the only true statement that can be made about that event. No one in the grappling community is surprised that we’ve returned again, fast, to our ten-year-plus debate between 10th Planet Jiu-jitsu and the “Gracies” (term used very loosely). Like the aftermath of the first match back in Sao Paulo in 2003, this match in Los Angeles was less about the actual grappling that took place, which was incredibly dynamic, but instead it was more about fighting for the meaning of the first match.

What we all knew – the contract that was understood – was that if one fighter emerged victorious through a submission, then something would be settled about what Royler’s loss to Bravo met ten years before. In other words, we were revisiting the first event through the creation of this second event in order to clarify the meaning of the first event.

In Jiu-Jitsu Unleashed (2005), Bravo put in the public discourse the debate surrounding the significance of the 2003 ADCC match identifying the stakes for the Gracies. (I’ve always felt indifferent to this, each is a system, so on and so forth but for so many you’d get kicked out your gym if they see you wrapping your outside leg over in the half-guard and before you could say lockdow/you’d get kicked out in shame.) In that book Bravo set the discursive terms through which the meaning of his victory ever since has been debated.

“That was all I had ever wanted to do – tap out Royler Gracie. I had wanted to defeat him by using the Twister, but now I knew this was far better. I had beaten him on the up-and-up. He had been training jiu-jitsu since he was two years old. I had been training less than ten years and was only a brown belt! … From that point on, no one could claim that training without the gi didn’t work because I had just proved that it did. I fell to my knees and started crying uncontrollably.”

For Bravo, the victory over Royler in 2003 was a validation of his unique approach to jiu-jitsu that discards the gi, a hindrance, he claims, to the development of the martial art.

“In traditional Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the gi has almost become a holy garment. Players use the collar and sleeve of their opponent’s uniform to set up submissions, sweeps, and passes. This works wonderfully for regular grappling tournaments where competitors wear a gi, but it does not translate well for no-gi grappling tournaments or mixed martial arts….”

I haven’t found a record, yet, of what that first match against Bravo meant to Royler himself before the match. I doubt he could have anticipated the way the loss was “impregnated” with meaning beyond the fact it was a second-round match in a still continuing double-elimination tournament.

What we do know is that prior to that match, Royler had won three ADCC championships in a row (1999, 2000, 2001 – there was no 2002 because of September 11th venue issues.) Royler had also won four consecutive IBJJF World Jiu-Jitsu Championships (1996, 97, 98, 99). In other words, entering that second-round match versus Bravo, Royler had won the most prestigious nogi championship three times and the most prestigious gi championship four times.

Royler lost to Bravo. Continued to fight in the tournament. Ended up winning third place after Leo Viera and Baret Yoshida.

Bravo beat Royler. Continued to fight. Lost to Viera. Withdrew. Ended up placing lower than Royler in the double-elimination tournament.

The results of the tournament are, however, immaterial, irrelevant, and incongruent with the meaning and cultural impact that followed afterward.

I won’t rehash what I assume most of you know about the battle between 10th Planet Jiu-jitsu and the Gracies (not all of them, I know). For those of you that don’t know, just take Bravo’s words above about the significance of his 2003 victory, and put it in historical light of what Royler had accomplished to that point, and the claim that Bravo “never competed again.”

…until last Saturday, that is, in Metamoris 3.

One of the first questions we must answer is whether fighting eleven years after “the event,” where one competitor (Royler) is forty-eight years of age and the other forty-three, counts as a real rematch? It was certainly marketed as so.

Yet, since we already established that the first match in itself within the context of ADCC was insignificant, what this match was really doing was revisiting the match but as “an event:” that moment that created a uniquely Southern California brand of jiu-jitsu, full of its culture of rock, pot, and the un-ironic approach to branding moves in that style (e.g. Lockdown, Jailbreak, Rubber Guard, Mission Control, et al) and pitted them squarely against the traditional Old School brand of jiu-jitsu, particularly those of the Children of Hélio, (which sounds like the title of an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.)

Revisiting an event through the recreation of a 2nd event is essentially a fight to control the meaning of the first event. We all knew this watching Metamoris. That was the larger stake. There’s a fallacy here, though. We are admitting that the past can be changed by the present. Yet, this has never stopped us before. Don’t we do this all the time, doesn’t the present always change the meaning of the past. You return to your ex-girlfriend or boyfriend and everything is reshuffled, some things are muted, rendered insignificant, others heightened as proof of love, and whatnot.

Regardless, we got our fight. And?

Eddie Bravo and Royler Gracie part two ended in a “Metamoris draw.” They had twenty minutes to submit each other and neither did. To most observers, including this one, Bravo clearly was the dominant fighter, and proved that he can get Royler to fight within his jiu-jitsu system. (Bravo did this in 2003, also. In fact, both matches started the same way with Bravo getting half-guard or quarter-guard.) For his part, Royler proved he could not be submitted by Eddie’s moves: electric chairs, one 100% crank, and one vaporizer. Royler, however, could not mount an offense within Bravo’s system. Royler could not pass Bravo’s lockdown half-guard. Twenty minutes went by, the final four with Royler stuck in the vaporizer to which most viewers cringed, but to which Royler shook his head at while desperately establishing grips to lessen the pressure. The horn (or whatever it is that Metamoris blasts to signal the end of the match) sounded. Draw.

It was the worst result for those of us that wanted this drama to end. I for one, though, was thoroughly impressed with Eddie, and I decided to study the 10th planet system.

An official draw, though, means I will hide in a cave; it’s a match in which both camps can claim victory. Where the meaning of the first event does not become clarified. Nothing is settled. But a few things did shift to even die-hard children of Hélio. Perhaps because Bravo attempted more attacks and acted with dignity and sincerity after the match, he seemed to have gained the respect of a few more people; and Royler’s disingenuous maneuver when the referee was resetting the match in the middle probably had his respect diminished in the eyes of some. (I won’t even touch that thing about Royce post-fight.)

It seems we are left where we began. Once more each camp raises its boulder up the hill only to see it fall. We were expecting a fight taking place in teleological time; what we got was one in cyclical time. We wanted a victor once and for all time; we didn’t even get a winner of the match. We are stuck in Nietzsche’s eternal return, longing for Kundera’s lightness of being. We wished for an outcome where no return to the original event was possible, for a Metamoris 3 that would have obliterated the past, which would have made fools of those who’d still choose to look to 2003.

Instead, we got the most absurd outcome in competitive sports possible, the bane of every athlete, every fan, every promoter, and every one who wants to settle the only real question in all of sports, the one that makes sports feel better than life, to get the definitive answer, who won? It was a tie. No one won. Everyone won. Zeus won, as we are left with our unsettled Sisyphean debate. We got a tie.

I do not understand why everyone was smiling after the match ended. We’re back where we were. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. No one is saved from the logorrhea to continue in this stupid camp war. For me, I just downloaded JIu-Jitsu Unleashed on my Kindle to fill what I now realize is a big hole in my game.