Garry Tonon has enjoyed plenty of success since deciding to transition to MMA, but even he found his first training sessions difficult. He was already an elite Jiu-Jitsu competitor when he decided to make his MMA debut, but that only really gave him an advantage in one area. He still needed to adapt his Jiu-Jitsu to suit MMA rules and although he had decent wrestling, the level of wrestling in MMA is significantly higher than it is in Jiu-Jitsu. Then comes the biggest problem, as striking is pretty much half of the game in MMA and it’s completely absent from Jiu-Jitsu.
It wasn’t just getting used to the full range of skills needed that made MMA tough for Tonon though; a big part of that came down to his sparring partners:
“Some of the first like full sparring sessions I had were with (Jake Shields) and it was for like, I don’t know how long we were training… I don’t know if it was a week straight, two weeks straight or something like that. But it was just like I would do three rounds with Jake every day.”
It might seem crazy to stick someone new to MMA with a UFC veteran and former StrikeForce world champion right from the start, but it was instruction from John Danaher and Tonon thinks there was a reason behind it:
“I don’t think John (Danaher) will ever say it, you know come out straight out and say it, but I don’t think John ever really wanted me to do MMA. I was thinking that he was like hoping that I would just consistently stick with grappling.”
Tonon also explained why he thinks Danaher might have wanted him to stick with Jiu-Jitsu:
“MMA’s risky man. You know like I could have gone in there and just like embarrassed myself. Not that I necessarily thought that that’s what he thought was going to happen, but there’s a lot of risk involved. It’s a tough sport, it’s not easy to like make a name for (yourself), and all these things. He knew it was going to be a difficult thing.”
It makes sense from that perspective and realistically, many elite grapplers have chosen not to pursue MMA fully and have focused on their original sport instead. Garry Tonon thinks that the difficulty of those early training sessions was intentional, so that he could make sure he really did want an MMA career:
“He knew that I was already doing really well in grappling and it’s like, why mess that up you know? I think that part of his way of making sure that I was really into this and I really wanted to do it was making the early part of my training like very difficult. So it’s like if I didn’t really want to do it, I wasn’t going to stick with it because it was tough to do those training sessions.”
The full interview with Garry Tonon where he shares the struggles he had transitioning to MMA was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Jake Shields’ Fight Back podcast:
