Mario Sperry recently revealed a little-known secret from all the way back in the beginning of ADCC, that BJJ legend Rickson Gracie almost competed in the promotion’s very first superfight. The first edition of the tournament took place in 1998 and Sperry was one of the handful of elite grapplers who was invited to compete. He finished that weekend with the biggest achievement possible, as he won both the under 99kg and absolute divisions to become the promotion’s first double champion. That cemented Sperry’s place in the history books, but it also gave him the opportunity to compete for the inaugural superfight title the following year.
Sperry did return in 1999 to compete for the superfight title and without any other absolute champion to face him ADCC booked him against Enson Inoue. As Sperry explains though, Inoue apparently wasn’t the first choice:
“I was not offered… What I’ve heard, and I was not there, (it’s) what people told me from ADCC. The organizers told me ‘look, we’re trying to get Rickson (Gracie) to fight you. Would you fight him?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course. It would be an honor to fight him.’ And that was it. Then all of a sudden they put Enson Inoue, because Inoue submitted Randy Couture and was a big name at the time.”
He’s not wrong of course, Inoue was a big name in the sport at the time and the superfight was a very popular booking. Obviously the match against Rickson would have been a huge moment for the promotion and it would likely have been a match that still gets talked about today, but Sperry explained that they didn’t have the obvious choice that they do now:
“I was the first absolute champion so who am I gonna fight? I need another absolute champion, right? So we didn’t have that, so maybe they chose Rickson or I don’t know exactly what happened but that’s what I heard. But when it didn’t come through, they called Enson Inoue.”
When he was pressed about why Rickson Gracie didn’t end up doing the ADCC superfight, Sperry didn’t have the exact answer but he had heard some rumours:
“Later on what I’ve heard is that he asked for some amount of money that they didn’t agree with. That’s what I heard, I was not there.”
The full interview with Mario Sperry where he claimed that he almost faced Rickson Gracie in the first ADCC superfight was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the Lytes Out podcast:
