Mikey Musumeci recently shared a rant against the complaints he’s been hearing about guard pulling and butt-scooting in Jiu-Jitsu matches. It’s understandable that it might be frustrating for him, considering he’s one of the world’s best guard-players and relies heavily on his ability to attack from the bottom. Naturally, this means that he doesn’t ever engage in wrestling exchanges willingly and would much rather concede top position right from the start of his matches.
Because of his tendency to pull guard or simply sit down at the start of his matches, he’s likely heard his fair share of criticism about how applicable this is to a real-life altercation. He decided to meet that criticism head on:
“I’m so sick of hearing people complain about pulling guard and butt-scooting in Jiu-Jitsu. The first thing I’m going to say is this is sport Jiu-Jitsu, there’s no striking in sport Jiu-Jitsu. Obviously in a real fight on the street, on concrete, you’re not going to pull guard right? But in sport Jiu-Jitsu, the goal is to submit the person as fast as you can.”
He’s not wrong about the fact that Jiu-Jitsu is a sport, just like wrestling or boxing and any other limited combat sports that aren’t completely applicable to a fight in the outside world. The fact that pulling guard isn’t a great idea in that setting isn’t the only criticism that Mikey Musumeci addressed though. People often argue that takedowns are more exciting than pulling guard but as Musumeci points out, a lot of long wrestling exchanges in Jiu-Jitsu matches aren’t that fun to watch;
“Then that leads me to the next point: Wrestling in Jiu-Jitsu. You’ll constantly see two guys wrestling in Jiu-Jitsu and honestly let’s be honest… Jiu-Jitsu people suck at wrestling. Any D1 wrestler will destroy most Jiu-Jitsu people in wrestling, right? We’re horrible at it! So then you’ll see two guys, both are horrified to get guillotined so nobody’s shooting and then they just handfight the whole time right. So what are you doing there? You’re not even trying to do submissions, you’re doing nothing, you’re just handfighting and just wasting time. Who wants to see that?!”
There will undoubtedly be plenty of people who would disagree with the take that Mikey Musumeci has on guard pulling and butt-scooting, but he does make some solid points in defense of the practices. He made one more point before he finished his rant:
“Guard pullers try to get to submissions, which is the goal of sport Jiu-Jitsu. Submit the person as fast as you can. But then let me ask you another question. You don’t want us to pull guard, you don’t want us to butt-scoot. Fine, take us down. Where do we end up? We end up on bottom just as if we pulled guard. So now I’m confused. Explain to me the difference between somebody taking me down and I end up on bottom, or me pulling guard. One is more efficient than the other, right? One wastes less time, for me to submit the person as fast as I can.”
Mikey Musumeci shared his full rant against complaints about guard pulling and butt-scooting in a post to his official Instagram account:
