Merab on Wrestlers' Respect — A BJJ Reckoning

If you train BJJ, you already owe a quiet debt to wrestling — and this week UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili gave that debt a voice. Speaking on Dominick Cruz's podcast, the Georgian champ argued that wrestlers are among the most underappreciated athletes on the planet, and the more you sit with what he said, the harder it is to disagree from the Jiu Jitsu side of the mat.

What Merab actually said

Dvalishvili's point wasn't sentimental. It was economic. "What was bad about wrestling is the good wrestlers, they don't get the respect they deserve," he told Cruz, per BJJEE. "Even if they got second place in the world, nobody knows. No money." He went further, estimating that the overwhelming majority of wrestlers grind through entire careers for nothing more than strength, health, and discipline — never recognition, never a paycheck. The weight cuts, the early mornings, the years of physical punishment, all of it largely invisible to the public.

It's a striking thing to hear from a reigning world champion. Merab came up in judo before wrestling and MMA reshaped his game, and he admitted that his judo habits initially cost him — giving up his back on takedowns because, in judo, you don't hang onto the position the way you do in freestyle. That detail matters to us, because it's the same lesson every grappler relearns when they cross-train: the base you start with is a gift and a liability at the same time.

Why this lands hard in a Jiu Jitsu gym

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has spent the last decade quietly importing wrestling wholesale. Look at the most dominant grapplers in the sport right now and the throughline is obvious — the wrestlers win the scrambles, dictate where the fight happens, and decide who plays guard and who passes. The Ruotolo brothers wrestle. Gordon Ryan built his early game on understanding the scramble. Every serious no-gi competitor eventually books wrestling classes, hires a wrestling coach, or starts watching folkstyle finishes on YouTube like film study.

And yet wrestling itself, as a sport, has almost no commercial home. A two-time NCAA finalist can walk into your academy and most of the room won't know their name. That's the gap Merab is pointing at. We borrow the takedowns, the chain attacks, the relentless top pressure — and we rarely stop to acknowledge that someone spent fifteen years getting cut and bruised to make those techniques second nature.

Real American Freestyle and a shifting tide

There's a hopeful wrinkle here. When Cruz raised Real American Freestyle — the new pro wrestling league working to give the sport a stage and a payday — Merab was all in. "I love wrestling," he said, adding that he'd fallen for it harder than ever now that he's training it for fun rather than survival. See his comments on YouTube.

For the BJJ world, RAF is worth watching for the same reason the early submission-only circuits were. When a grappling discipline finally builds a professional platform, the talent stops leaking away to other sports and the techniques get sharper, faster, and more visible. A healthier wrestling ecosystem is a healthier Jiu Jitsu ecosystem. The two arts feed each other, and they always have.

The takeaway for the rest of us

You don't need to fight in the UFC to act on any of this. The practical move is simple: respect the wrestling in your own game, and the wrestlers who teach it. If your academy runs a takedown class, go to it instead of skipping straight to guard. If there's an ex-collegiate wrestler rolling in your room, ask them to walk you through a single-leg finish or a hand-fighting drill. They almost certainly spent more hours in a wrestling room than you've spent on the mats total, and most of them will share it gladly because, as Merab said, recognition was never really part of the deal for them.

Jiu Jitsu likes to think of itself as the thinking grappler's art — the gentle technique that beats brute strength. That's true, and it's also incomplete. The takedown that gets you to your favorite position came from somewhere. The scramble you win because you don't panic on bottom came from somewhere. More often than not, it came from a wrestler who never got a trophy big enough to match the work.

So next time you hit a clean double-leg in a roll, spare a thought for the people Merab was talking about. They built the foundation a lot of modern BJJ stands on, and they did it for almost nothing. The least we can do is know their names. See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.