Jeff Glover has just stepped in on short notice to compete against UFC legend Urijah Faber in a Combat Jiu-Jitsu match at A1 Combat 21 on May 25th, 2024. Faber is actually the promoter who operates A1 Combat and he’s decided to make an appearance on their upcoming event, although he’s staying firmly retired from professional MMA and was set for a grappling match with openhanded strikes instead. He was originally supposed to be facing his old rival Jeff Curran in a rematch at the event, but Curran has had to withdraw from the CJJ match due to undisclosed circumstances.
That might have been the end of it, but the promotion managed to pull something unexpected out of the bag by booking Jeff Glover to step in as a replacement on a little over a month’s notice. Not only would most fans have predicted that a fellow former MMA fighter would step in instead, but nobody could have foreseen Glover coming out of retirement. He last competed in a professional grappling match all the way back at Battlefield Fighting Championship 1 in 2017, an event that actually took place just two weeks after the first ever Combat Jiu-Jitsu matches took place at EBI 11.
While Jeff Glover has been out of action for the last 7 years, Urijah Faber continued competing in the UFC for the first 2 of those years and he’s remained active in other combat sports since then too. Not only did he return to wrestling competition for the first time in two decades with a silver medal at the US Open, but he’s also taken both regular Jiu-Jitsu and Combat Jiu-Jitsu matches too. His most recent match was actually just at the end of 2022, as he took CJJ world champion Elias Anderson all the way to EBI overtime before losing there.
A1 Combat announced the news that Jeff Glover was stepping in to face Urijah Faber on short notice in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
