Kron Gracie has just announced that he has no intention of ever pulling guard again when it comes to his MMA career. It’s something that normally goes without saying in MMA, as most fighters will go through their entire careers without ever doing it. Kron is not just any fighter though, he’s an elite BJJ competitor with an incredibly dangerous guard. He’s also the son of an MMA legend who still believes in the more traditional approach to the sport that was popular in his time. This has meant that not only has Kron had a reason to pull guard but he’s also had a template that encourages it to follow too.
Although he’s done it before, it backfired tremendously at UFC 310 when Bryce Mitchell caught the guard pull and slammed him to the mat to knock him out. Kron was recently asked about that fight and the finishing sequence in particular, and he was refreshingly candid:
“I mean, I was fighting a top guy, obviously. He was in the top 15, and I knew it was going to be a tough fight, but I was very confident and I was doing well, and I had a lot of confidence in my guard and pulling guard, and I just made a mistake and I paid for it. So I feel like that’s just kind of the name of the game. Sometimes you zig and you should have zagged, and then you get cracked and so that’s what happened.”
That fight took place almost a year ago now and Kron hasn’t fought since. He explained that this wasn’t intentional though:
“(From an) actual technical point of view, there were some technical mistakes I made and that’s why I paid the price. But this is the fight business, and I know the the game is dangerous, and that’s what it is. So it’s nothing new to me, or nothing I’m shocked about, it didn’t really change anything in my mind. I was actually trying to get back into that fighting as soon as possible. It just kind of took a long time for me to get another fight, so I didn’t try to take this year off… I was trying to get back in fighting, trying to get motivated to get on another card and continue. I felt like that was kind of like my momentum to get back into it, and things didn’t happen the way it should have, and it took a little longer and now, now we’re finally getting it done. So it’s not like I tried to take this year off.“
He will be back in action soon but it won’t be at the same level as before, as he was released by the UFC after that loss. Despite parting ways with the promotion, he doesn’t seem to hold any ill will towards them:
“Just generally… you’re fighting a top guy, if you win or lose, you should be able to stay in the game. But I think the way that I fought, the way I pulled guard, and the way that it happened, a lot of fans were disappointed and I lost a lot of stock in that transition. So, I think that’s kind of like as a fan and as a business, the UFC is a business, it makes sense for them to be like, ‘Well, you lost a lot of fans, like go get your fans back, go get some wins and see what happens.‘“
That’s when he explained that both the loss to Bryce Mitchell and being released by the UFC have changed the way that he’s going to approach fighting in the future:
“But, I can understand. It’s a business. If pulling guard is going to be that much of a detriment to the ability to keep fighting, and the ability to make money, then f**k it, I won’t pull guard ever again. And I already made that decision that I’m done with pulling guard. I always do really well from pulling guard, and it was something that I had in my back pocket, but I feel like now, not only for myself, I have to try to get on top. I have to try to be effective in different positions, and I kind of didn’t really have that mindset because I was so successful from the bottom, generally.”
The full interview with Kron Gracie where he reveals that he won’t be pulling guard in MMA again was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of MMAFighting:
