Yesterday, new broke that Gordon Ryan was joining MMA promotion ONE. Today, the ADCC Champion spoke about what this meant in a statement. To cut a long story short, he announced that his primary move to the far-east promotion would involve grappling, with the option of MMA at some point. He reiterated that his main focus at this point was to prepare for the 2022 ADCC.
As well, he used quite an unusual phrase to describe his grappling in ONE, mentioning the term ‘fence wrestling’. This sounds like it’s straight out of John Dahaner’s mouth – however, Ryan explained it in detail here: “I am very excited to see my fans in other parts of the world, but also to rebrand myself as one of the best fence wrestlers of all time. I’ve managed to outpace the competition in the open, so wrestling the fence will present new challenges for me, which is very exciting.”
This sounds like he will be doing some kind of grappling that involves wrestling up against the cage, which is a very valuable technique for MMA and grows even more important by the day. So, for now – the focus is on grappling and we may see some kind of hybrid promotion at some point, you can also expect to see him face off against some of the best grapplers in the east, which has some great Japanese wrestlers and Judoka’s.
