Sherdog’s Top 10: Most Influential Fighters

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1. Royce Gracie

Gracie is the original influencer from whom all others are derived. Every fighter today has to know at least some Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and that is all thanks to Gracie. The entire technical development, the move and countermove and counter-countermove that has driven the evolution of mixed martial arts as a sport, can be traced to Gracie’s dominant run through the early Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

The idea of Brazilian jiu-jitsu was simple. Most fights end up on the ground at one point or another, and most people have no idea how to fight there. Jiu-jitsu practitioners focused on that phase of combat, building on the judo base Mitsuyo Maeda taught to the early Gracies. Gracie demonstrated the effectiveness of that approach very quickly, proving that a small competitor could beat larger men through the proper application of leverage and technique.

As much as the actual effectiveness of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, that image -- a smaller man cleanly finishing a larger one, over and over -- endeared Gracie to the viewing public and inspired an entire generation of martial artists and fighters to take up both his art and mixed martial arts. There was no succeeding as a fighter under MMA or vale tudo rules without jiu-jitsu.

In actuality, the period of Gracie dominance in mixed martial arts was relatively brief, but it was precisely the scale of that domination that drove the technical developments that rendered pure Brazilian jiu-jitsu increasingly less viable by itself. Nobody could compete with them on the ground, and it was imperative to either learn to avoid it altogether or figure how to beat them there.

All of that started with Gracie.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS: Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Dan Severn, Wanderlei Silva, Mirko Filipovic, Matt Hume, Anderson Silva, Bas Rutten, Lyoto Machida, B.J. Penn, Georges St. Pierre

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