MMA veteran Chael Sonnen recently revealed that he actually lied about being a BJJ black belt earlier on in his career. Sonnen is a legend of the sport who has had dozens of professional fights dating back to the very earliest days of organized MMA in 1997. The sport was dramatically different back then compared to what it has become today, and the UFC itself was just a few years old when Sonnen made his professional debut. It really was the wild west when it came to MMA and even martial arts in general were not particularly well regulated at all.
Sonnen started out his story by setting the scene and explaining what he was doing back when he first started working towards a career in the sport:
“Once upon a time, I am living in Eugene, Oregon. I am minding my own business. Now, I am secretly mastering the sport of the no holds barred, I am mastering doing UFC. I am mastering the NHB, all these different terms, Mixed Martial Arts wasn’t even the official term.”
Sonnen was definitely one of the early-adopters of MMA and although the sport didn’t really have that official name yet, he was already mixing different martial arts styles:
“At the time of this story, which is 1999, I am a wrestler at the University of Oregon and after wrestling practice I am going across town and I am training with Marcus Lewis at Hard Knocks Gym…”
It wasn’t just wrestling and striking that Chael Sonnen was working on at the time though, also used to claim that he was a BJJ black belt:
“I was also a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu and that part wasn’t a secret. I would tell people I was a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu. In fact, the fact that I was black belt in Jiu-Jitsu got to two purple belts under (Wellington ‘Megaton’ Dias), who happens to be Mackenzie Dern’s father. Ryan Kelly and Harold Utterbach. They are purple belts in this town that we live in, I am a black belt of which I told them. They invited me to come roll with them, so I did. I can’t even tell you…”
That training session showed him that he wasn’t quite at the level that he originally thought in terms of Jiu-Jitsu, but it was still unusual for him to claim to be a black belt in the first place. According to Sonnen, he may have actually got the idea from another elite wrestler:
“I was told by Mark Schultz that you in Jiu-Jitsu are whatever belt you’re willing to defend, you’re willing to compete at. If you go to a Jiu-Jitsu tournament you would sign up and you will write your belt down. If you say ‘I am a black belt’ and you go out there with black belts and you can have success, you are a black belt. Mark has actually heard me tell that story and said ‘Hey Chael, I don’t remember me telling you that’.”
Chael Sonnen has actually been promoted to black belt in BJJ by Fabiano Scherner in the years since this, but he definitely wasn’t one back when this story took place:
“So I’m a fake black belt. I’m a fake black belt working on Muay Thai with Marcus, I’m wrestling in the U of O. I’ve got this whole thing figured out, I’ll be the UFC champion.”
Chael Sonnen explained that he lied about being a BJJ black belt in a recent interview uploaded to his official YouTube channel:
