Ronda Rousey & Gilbert Melendez: A BJJ Time Capsule

Words: Jiu Jitsu Style

When this short Ronda Rousey and Gilbert Melendez clip first landed on Jiu Jitsu Style in September 2014, the note we ran underneath it was almost embarrassingly small: "nice roll between Ronda Rousey and Gilbert Melendez." Two sentences and a video player. Twelve years on, that two-minute roll has aged into one of the more interesting BJJ artefacts of the era — a quiet afternoon at the Cesar Gracie school in Stockton, the women's bantamweight champion of the world and a former Strikeforce lightweight king passing the time on the mats between camps. The lessons baked into it have outlasted both their careers.

The clip itself is unremarkable on a first watch, which is exactly the point. Ronda starts in her judoka's posture — gripping high, breaking balance, looking for the angle a brown belt should be hunting for from her feet. Gilbert plays the longer Cesar Gracie team rhythm — patient grips, sticky guard, no panic. There are no spectacular finishes. He hand-fights, she postures up, the position resets. Roll a clock on what's happening and you see a 2014 cross-section of where MMA's striking-led champions were on the ground: technically literate, comfortable from every position, no longer scared of Jiu Jitsu — but not chasing it either. That was the new normal, and we filmed it as if it was nothing.

The Cesar Gracie school in 2014 was the right room for the picture. Nick and Nate Diaz, Jake Shields, Gilbert and his cousin Jesus Melendez — a Stockton clique that had been doing serious Brazilian Jiu Jitsu since before half of the modern UFC roster had tied a belt. Ronda flying in to drill there was the obvious move for an Olympic medallist who needed her ground game to look less like a judoka's afterthought and more like the system every contender she was about to fight was already running. Cesar's mat is where she ironed that out. The roll we ran was a quiet snapshot of that work.

What changed since 2014

The decade since has been kind to the basic idea behind the clip. In 2014, BJJ players sometimes still talked about MMA fighters as if they were tourists — people who learned just enough to keep their head out of the choke and got out. That stopped being a useful framing somewhere around the time Mackenzie Dern walked out of an IBJJF black belt world title and into the UFC. It became a punchline once Khabib Nurmagomedov turned championship rounds into back-take clinics, and a non-starter once Khamzat Chimaev started landing inside trips and finishing arm-triangles like a Renzo Gracie purple belt on a deadline.

The other direction has held up too. Ronda's wrist locks and outside trip armbars were Jiu Jitsu by way of judo, and they pushed an entire generation of competition players to take judo gripping more seriously than they had been. Ffion Davies trained judo as much as Jiu Jitsu growing up and tells anyone who'll listen what that did for her ADCC matches. Mikey Musumeci has spoken openly about studying judo entries to make his BJJ takedown game less of a liability. The mat doesn't really care which discipline a technique was born in — it cares whether the technique works against a resisting opponent. The 2014 roll was an early demonstration of two grapplers from different doors meeting in the middle and shrugging.

The Stockton chapter, in 2026 light

Both careers in the original video have since moved on. Gilbert retired from MMA in 2018, settled into coaching duties at the school, and is still teaching the Cesar Gracie no-gi system to a generation of fighters who were toddlers when the clip we ran was filmed. Ronda left the UFC after the Amanda Nunes loss, went to WWE and then to the farm and the broadcast booth, and somewhere along the way picked up a Jiu Jitsu black belt under Henry Akins — a fact that's easy to miss because she never made a circus of it. The version of Ronda Rousey who walked out to face Holly Holm was already a real Jiu Jitsu player. The roll with Gilbert sits a few rungs earlier on that ladder.

What the rest of us can take to the gym

For the rest of us, the lesson in a 2014 archive clip is simple enough. The cross-pollination between BJJ and the cage isn't a debate any more — it's how serious players prepare, on both sides of the fence. If you are training Jiu Jitsu and you've never drilled a single judo trip, you are leaving a chunk of your standing game on the table. If you're training for MMA and you treat your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a survival skill rather than a system, your better-grappling opponent will figure that out before your first head-kick lands. The Stockton mat in 2014 already knew the answer.

Find a partner with a different background to yours and roll with them as often as you can. The next Mackenzie Dern, the next Mikey Musumeci, the next Ronda Rousey is being made in a room where two disciplines are sat next to each other and asked to behave.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 29 September 2014. Refreshed for 2026.