

Photo via Metamoris

For Rafael Lovato Jr, the thought of being a well rounded martial artist means the world to him. It’s why the second American to win the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu World Championships as a black belt (after BJ Penn) will be entering an MMA cage for the first time later this month.

Lovato is set to make his debut at Legacy FC 35, where he’ll be facing Canaan Grigsby at middleweight. The transition from BJJ to MMA is a debated subject in the grappling world, with jiu jitsu athletes hyper aware of the physical risks that a career in MMA can cause. Lovato however, believes the aggressive mentality he brings to jiu jitsu was actually born from an early age studying MMA.

Before he steps into the Legacy cage, Lovato spoke to Fightland and explained his early years as a martial artist, from being one of the first teens to ever compete at the Worlds to becoming a World champion. He talked about the inherent differences of MMA and BJJ as a competitor, and his understanding of the essence of jiu jitsu. This is an essence which he feels has been lost in jiu jitsu competition.

Fightland: Why have you decided to make a transition to fighting MMA? What about MMA over pure jiu jitsu is so compelling?

Rafael Lovato Jr: I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m making a transition. I’m still planning on fighting at the worlds and ADCC and everything like that. I’d love to do another Metamoris event. Growing up, training as a kid, I did a lot of stand-up martial arts and I’ve been doing martial arts my whole life. I fell in love with jiu jitsu when I was a teenager. I loved the science of it. It was really cool for me because I was a bigger kid, I was long and tall and had a good guard and by the time I was fourteen I was able to start catching a lot of adults.

That was right around the time when the UFC was making its name and I thought to myself that I’ve spent my whole life growing up in martial arts, doing a lot of stand up, I’m learning jiu jitsu, and I said that one day I’m going to do MMA, that’s what I’m being built and bred for.

Why did you wait before starting in MMA? What did you want to achieve in jiu jitsu, not only as a competitor but as an American competitor?

I really wanted to make a big mark in jiu jitsu. BJ Penn was the first American to win the worlds and he won the worlds and that was it. That was the only black belt tournament he even did. So I wanted to be one of the top guys for several years and win a lot and be the best of my generation. I wanted to inspire other Americans and show that we can be at the highest level.

So you see this as a new way of challenging yourself as a martial artist? Do you see your style of jiu jitsu being effective for MMA?

I’m motivated for a different challenge. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of tournaments. I’ve fought several different generations of black belts. I’ve always felt my jiu jitsu and my approach to jiu jitsu translates to MMA. I’m submission orientated; I’m dangerous on top and on bottom. I’m intrigued that maybe I’m designed for MMA, as opposed to pure jiu jitsu and I just haven’t really tapped into it yet.

The idea of being able to completely challenge yourself as a martial artist. How you handle the pressure, how you perform. That’s very exciting for me, to show my full range of abilities as a martial artist. Obviously, I’m not going out there to just brawl with a guy and it’s been great to really focus in on muay thai. It’s exciting for me to develop myself and have fully well rounded skills.

I understand your father followed Bruce Lee into Jeet Kun Do and from a young age you have trained in different martial arts. What does it mean to be a lifelong martial artist?

My father is a JKD instructor and he always believed in being a complete martial artist and so growing up and training as a kid, even when I was doing jiu jitsu tournaments, there was never any segregation. We were training muay thai and MMA fighters back then. I was training MMA as a teenager, and that’s how I learned jiu jitsu. I didn’t learn it for sport tournaments. We learned it for self-defence and for real life scenarios. So I was going with little gloves and going against adults when I was 16-17. Once I got to the black belt level I had to solely focus on jiu jitsu but I feel like my jiu jitsu was created that way and my mind-set as far as my approach and my style of being aggressive was very much based from the perspective of fighting. This was due to my father and now I’m reliving that and bringing all that back out of me now.

What was it like being one of the first American teens to visit Brazil to study and compete in BJJ?

It was crazy. The first time I went to Brazil was 1999, I was 16. I wonder if maybe I was the first American teenager to go down because whenever I was there to compete at the worlds, it was the fourth worlds. The first was in 1996. So I was there at some of the very first worlds, competing in the juvenile division against the Brazilian teenagers. I was a kid from Oklahoma, I’d never been outside the country so to go to Brazil, and have that whole shock from the culture and the country and then to get on the mats. At that time, in America, most people were blue belts. You were lucky if you saw an American purple belt. There were few Americans at brown belt or higher. So to walk into a room and see a dozen or more black belts, world champions who I had seen on VHS tape (was incredible).

The tournament itself, I love competing in Brazil, I love the energy there and I fell in love with it from the very beginning. In my first year I lost my first match by advantage. I didn’t know how to play the game and was so shell shocked. The next year I won two medals as a blue belt. I actually went against stars of today like Vinny Magalhaes. That was the same year when I watched BJ win the world championships and watching him as a teenager, that was when I set my goal to be the next American black belt world champion.

You’ll be fighting alongside your first black belt Justin Rader at Legacy FC 35. How special is it for you to be able to compete alongside your own students?

It’s something that I cherish. I’m very lucky to have been able to compete alongside Saulo and Xande Ribeiro. With Saulo, I was a part of his last stretch at the top of his career. I’ve been in Oklahoma this whole time for my jiu jitsu career and I started teaching to help my father when I was 16. I’d been teaching for a long time, and for a while I kept thinking to myself I need to leave and move to a place with access to high level people and compete more and train. I thought I’d move to California. But I’d already put so much into teaching in OKC and my roots were here and my friends and family. So I stayed. It was really hard, especially when I got to a higher level and began competing against the best guys in the world and I was pretty much just training with blue belts. Now I really get to see the results of that and I don’t regret it one bit.

Now I have several black belts and it’s incredible to be able to compete with my guys and see them chase their dreams after years of training and molding. It’s at the point where their chasing those titles and dreams at the highest level right alongside me. One of my dreams was to have my own black belt world champion, and Rader and I became world champions on the same day together at No-Gi Worlds. It’s an amazing feeling, we’ve had so many great moments together, a lot of battles, years of blood, sweat and tears and now we get to move to this next phase together.

After the Pan Ams this year you began making headlines with your Save Jiu Jitsu movement. Where do you see problems in BJJ competition?

Let me start off by saying jiu jitsu is worldwide. It is a lifestyle that is bigger than me or anybody else. There have been a lot of ups and downs over the last few years over what I consider the essence of jiu jitsu being represented in competition. I’ve had a lot of those feelings going through me for a while and it just kind of hit a point where I felt the Pans this year was such a huge low of the quality of matches that I grew up watching that made me fall in love with jiu jitsu. There was so much fighting not to lose, rather than fighting for a finish and a victory. A lot of stalling rather than imposing your will. I’m all about strategy, there is a game to be played, but the end goal should always be the same: to try and reach the most dominant position possible and finish. Like my finals in the absolute at the Brazilian Nationals last year. I got ahead 5-0, there was less than a minute left and I felt he was mentally broken, and I wanted to finish, rather than grind out a win.

Why is a change in competition nature such a huge issue to you?

The biggest thing for me is how this mentality is going to affect the generations to come. You can’t be scared to lose, you can’t be scared to open things up and have maybe something not go your way because even if you lose, well then you’re going to have something to learn from. After a loss, it’s always good to think thank you for the match, I made a mistake, now I have something I can study for my game to make me a better jiu jitsu artist. If you stall the entire match and win, well really what have you learned from? How have you gotten better? What’s the benefit?

How liberating is it to be competing in one fight, as opposed to the traditional IBJJF tournament structure?

What I like is that I can put everything I have of myself into one match. Whereas in jiu jitsu tournaments you need to be smart, have a warm up match, you need to play the game a little, and working your way into having a strong finish. You don’t want to start strong; you want to keep getting better match after match. With one fight, you can give everything you have right off the bat, and that’s it. There’s nothing else to think about once that’s over with. I definitely feel a much different energy flowing through me day to day. This isn’t about showing that my jiu jitsu is better than this guy or that I have better technique than my opponent, now it’s do or die. They’re going to lock the cage and it’s going to be me and another man and we’re going to try and kill each other in fifteen minutes. It’s a much different energy; I feel an aggressiveness to it all. In a lot of ways, it's much simpler, more honest.

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