UFC Hall of Famer Forrest Griffin recently sat down with Dominick Cruz on the Love & War podcast to discuss his career in MMA. During the conversation, Griffin offered a glimpse into what it was like to know jiu-jitsu in the late 1990s.
When describing his early days as a police officer in 1999, he stated: “I went to the police academy, and I was like the only one. There’s like three of us that had actually done jiu-jitsu. This is 1999. And it was like so cool. I just felt like, I can’t explain this to you, but you felt like a ninja. Nobody else knows then,” Griffin explained.
During the conversation, Griffin also discussed his training partners during that era. He painted a picture of how limited the sport was.
“My best training partners were all like a buck 60 a buck 70. So even though I would go do gi jiu-jitsu with legit black belts, I was 235 lbs. I would just throw them away,” he said.
Griffin acknowledged the reality of weight classes, noting that even skilled practitioners couldn’t overcome significant size disadvantages. “They’re weight classes for a reason, you know,” he admitted, though he did credit one training partner who “had a wicked good choke.”
Griffin also described the reactions of his coworkers when they witnessed his grappling skills. “The guys I worked with in the club with were like, ‘Dude, what? You got to show me that.’ And I was like, ‘It’s kind of hard to learn. Like, it kind of takes a while. Like, like I’ve been doing this for a couple years now.’ Like I do this like 10-15 hours a week.”
Griffin also talked about of the general population’s knowledge of grappling at the time. He said, “Nobody knew how to defend a choke. Nobody knew how to do anything at all.”
This lack of understanding gave practitioners like Griffin a significant advantage, both in competition and in his work as a law enforcement officer.
Even decades later, Griffin works to develop the next generation of athletes through the UFC Performance Institute programs in Mexico City and Shanghai.
