If the west coast is considered the Mecca of grappling schools in America, someone had better take notice of the growing popularity of the sport in the east. With notable Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructors such as Renzo and Rodrigo Gracie, Ricardo "Cacharrao" Almeida, Marcos Santos, Mario Yamasaki, and Romeo "Jacare" Calvalcanti, as well as many other grappling schools and instructors, the east coast is starting to rival the west in the number of practioners and schools. The best method to sharpen the skills of all these athletes is through competition. Brian Cimins has taken it upon himself to organize and put on one of the largest grappling tournaments in the country. Constantly growing, Brian has got to be a very busy man. I called him up on Thursday, May 25, 2000 to see what makes him tick.

FCF: With such a great layout for a grappling tournament, you must have a grappling background yourself. Please tell us about that.
BC: Sure. I've been involved in submission grappling for about four years now, four and a half years I guess. I started training with a Sambo and wrestling instructor back in 1996 and just actually picked up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu last October, like 7 months now, I've been in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training with Marcos Santos. He is a Machado Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt. I just actually got my blue belt about a month ago, no two months ago. I competed in my first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournament in April, which happened to be the Pan American games.

FCF: How did you do?
BC: I lost [laughs]. I lost my first bout. I competed against the assistant instructor from Gracie Japan. It was a four-stripe [or degree] blue belt under Rickson and I lost by five points. I also competed in the Rickson Gracie Jiu Jitsu's New Jersey State Submission Wrestling Championships and won the Advanced Middleweight division by arm bar over Team Maxercise's Sandy Ferner [Blue Belt] in 2:48 minutes. I have competed in Gene LeBell's Grapplers Challenge, BAMA's Shoot fighting Fight Night II, Rising Sun Grappling Invitational, 2000 Pan American Games, 1999 Tri-State Ground Control Classic, and now this tournament. I have compiled a 5-6 Mixed Martial Arts record (Shoot fighting, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Submission Grappling). This was my first championship and now I know what the competitors feel like when they win!

FCF: What caused you to start running grappling tournaments?
BC: Basically, I had seen a few big shows, one in particular was the Gene LeBell Grappler's Challenge back in 1998, the summer in 1998 in August and I competed in it. There was nothing of that magnitude, that size, no tournament that big in my area [the east coast]. So, I actually, myself, traveled nine hours, drove there, with my instructor and two other competitors to compete in this. I knew the demand, the drive, the dedication that I had to it to get competition and bettering myself and all. I thought that a lot of people were the same that I was. After competing and meeting a lot of the competitors, I thought everybody was traveling from real far away and how dedicated these guys were to the competition and to training and competing themselves. So basically, I saw a really good opportunity in the market place. I wanted to create an environment that I thought was better than what I had seen. I competed in the tournament and I thought that it was slightly disorganized. It was not efficient in the way it ran. There were a lot of competitors. I mean, don't get me wrong, but it took like thirteen hours to complete. I just felt that was crazy. I sat around all day myself, as a non-gi grappler, competing in the advanced; I didn't fight until 9:00 pm. I thought that was unfair. I had to weigh in at 9:00 in the morning. What I saw was that, these organizations that were running the event wasn't treating the non-gi submission grappling the same way they were the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu [competitors]. I didn't like that. I thought personally that they could have easily run the divisions consecutively and they chose not to. They chose to complete the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu tournament first and then start the no-gi submission-grappling event. I was totally burnt out, exhausted by the end of the day. It was my first big, big tournament so I ran out of gas by the end of the day. So, what I came up with was a concept to develop exclusive tournaments, exclusive to submission grappling or exclusive to gi grappling, you know, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So, that basically prompted me to run the first Grappler's Quest back in April of 1999. It was my first event and people came from all over the country. I was so surprised. I was getting calls from Ohio. We had competitors from Colorado, Arizona, Toronto, Quebec; I mean it was every state you could imagine. I was very pleased. That was it. I saw demand. I saw how dedicated people were to training and I knew they'd come. I knew that if you build it, they WILL come. I built it up to be a tremendous event and I put everything I had in it. It was one of those events that I wish I could have competed in it to be honest with you because of the competition level. Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the better good of the sport, you know.

FCF: I am sure that most people do not realize the amount of work that goes on to put on a large tournament. I have yet to hear a bad review regarding the organization of your tournaments. Can you tell us the secret to your success?
BC: It's a lot of planning and a lot of really good people to help me out. For a long time, we were running events solely with people donating their time, which was just unbelievable to have many good quality friends and supporters that you have actually out there and not just for me, but for people supporting the sport itself. As my mom taught me, you ask somebody a favor once, great, you ask somebody a favor twice, ok, alright, you ask somebody three times, it's a job. Running a professional organization requires professionalism and in that regard, we basically have generated professional referees and judges. One of the problems I found through putting on events, competing in events, and also with helping out with other organization's events, was to be honest with you, a lack of overall professionalism. I think that it was due to the fact that people, they don't have organization when everyone's not on the same page. When you're being paid for something, you treat it as a job and you take more passion in it. You also realize that if you're getting paid for something, you have responsibilities that are involved in that. We basically organized an entire group of professional referees and judges and they're all paid, and I can tell you all right now, the quality of the refereeing and decision-making has gone up tremendously. We have a full point system that we have integrated and everybody who is actually a referee or judge is actually trained. They just can't come there and referee or judge. They're not just helping out, they're paid. It's a different level of professionalism.

FCF: Is it a sliding scale or does everyone get paid the same?
BC: It is a sliding scale. We have black belt referees, whatever art they may be in, including Sambo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, or even high-ranking wrestlers. Now if these people complete the six-hour training course for the referee and judges and agree to referee one match, they start at a certain base. Now there are some people that aren't black belts or have less experience than everyone else, it's a sliding scale based on their experience and every single time they help out with one of our events and actually referee, their pay goes up. So it is a sliding scale in the sense as to obviously there is a ceiling on their pay, but it does go up every single time as they gain more experience, if they are going to be a super fight referee, based on that.

FCF: Are they required to referee a certain number of matches?
BC: They're refereeing the entire day. We have a point system so we don't run in to overtime. I used to run an event with no point systems and to be honest with you, it was chaos. We just had so many complaints and people questioning the refereeing and the judging. Let me tell you, it is hard to try to run an event with no points because when you start drawing top quality competitors willing to put their name and their school's name on the line and now you have somebody, maybe not with a black belt or extensive training in refereeing and judging, sitting there determining your fate, subjective judging becomes a major problem. So, we standardized it and we have a very effective and efficient point system.

FCF: I feel that the top grapplers would love to compete more, but need venues and quality opponents. Do you agree or disagree?
BC: I totally agree. I think a lot of people, this is what we have been finding actually, is if you ran a Jiu-Jitsu tournament and you couldn't get anything past a blue belt [Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu belts go up from white, blue, purple, brown, and black] to compete in your tournament, and why is that? It's, for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, because the referees were being blue belts and/or purple belts. So, how could you ever expect to draw higher-level competition when you didn't have officials that were higher than blue or purple belts? It became a problem and conflict of interest. It is an ego thing, I think, possibly as well, but with just cause. I don't think that the people officiating were nearly good enough to draw out some of the top competitors. I think a lot of top quality competitors were almost afraid to get robbed because the guy officiating wasn't better than them, and not necessarily that they were better than them, you don't have to be a great competitor to be a great official, but you have to know everything, well not everything, but a lot. There are some dangerous moves and illegal techniques that as an official, you really need to be on top of. You're concerned about the welfare and the well being of the competitors. Actually in a venue, we only go after high quality facilities. A lot of organizations, they don't really put in, I mean it costs a lot of money to rent a high quality facility, no doubt, but I can tell you right now that it really pays off because you don't have oxygen problems. We have to have a warm-up area. You have to have a changing room. You have to have an ample amount of water fountains, really good food. I mean that's so important. Food is very important. As competitors are there all day long, if they don't have enough food or water or Powerade, Gatorade, Power bars, whatever it may be, they're going to burn out of energy. You have to have a lot of mats. We have always run with at least five mats to keep everything moving. Again, other tournaments, they run it [the weight classes] from top to bottom. They start from lightweight beginner and go through heavyweight advanced. If I'm a heavyweight-advanced guy, I don't want to wait around for nine hours of competition throughout the entire day to compete. I think it's a combination of that. I definitely think that it's efficiency of the event, the high quality venues, and high quality referees and judging. I think all those play a factor in drawing out top quality competitors, which we have been successfully doing.

FCF: Do you call up two or three weight classes at one time and they fight it out until you have the winner in each class?
BC: What we do now is that we have a very unique system that no one else is using right now and it is very unfortunate that no one is using it because it is the most efficient way to run an event. We used to run an event starting with children going to women going to seniors then going to the men's division. For example, novice featherweight would go first. Let's say that there was 30 guys in that division. That mat would not be done until the first through fourth place novice featherweight winners, which meant that the competitors kept competing, and competing, and competing until they were done with their division and if you competed…have you competed in events?

FCF: Yes, actually that's the same method they use in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championships. I competed in the World Championships in 97' and you get in the pit and stay there until you win your division or you are eliminated.
BC: Exactly. Well, that's a very, very difficult thing to do. You can imagine. The way we used to run the events, we used to have overtime. We had no point system. So, if you have overtime and you run the division through to completion, you can talk about fighting the last year's top place winner first with a 13-minute double overtime and they went the distance. Now you've been in there for 13 minutes. Let's say the guy right before you, who your gonna fight for 1st and 2nd place had a 17 second flying arm bar match and he's fresh as can be and he rested during your match while you were getting exhausted. Now you're done and what do they do? They call up, "ok so and so, you have a 5 minute rest." 5 minutes has gone by and the guy's not in any shape to continue. So recovery wise, it was a very bad process. Also to add to that, during that 5-minute rest, the mat is dead. There's nothing going on at that time. So efficiency wise and getting the event over quickly, it was totally inefficient. So what we did is we decided to run it like wrestling does. We took wrestling's philosophy of running different brackets consecutively. Meaning, novice first…let's say there's five mats. We divide all forty divisions up, so there's eight divisions on each mat. What we'd run first is the preliminary elimination round of every division and running 5 rings at once, it moves fairly quickly. Then the quarterfinals. Then the semi-finals, and what is great about it, is basically, the finals are all at once. And it's great with the finals, you can actually run it less than five mats because there's only, say 20 final matches that go on and everybody loves it because they know that they are watching the championship. I had to look at it from many perspectives. You have to look at it from a competitor's perspective. If you're running me through the gauntlet all day long, I'm not going to be able to give you my best performance. That is not acceptable. As a fan, you have no idea what match is going on, what division it is. This gave us the opportunity, the way we're running it now with this new tournament bracketing formula basically gave us the opportunity to announce first and second place…you know, "so and so from Rickson Gracie academy versus so and so from Renzo Gracie academy," and it really got the teams supporting, the fans involved, and it was great. The fans have the opportunity to follow the winner through out the day, instead of losing track because they're trying to jump back and forth between rings because there is total chaos when you try to run a division through to completion. You never know when the final is. It's working great and I can't take credit for that. One of my fellow promoters, we tried it the first time at the New York City Grappling Challenge, April 29th of this year. It went fantastically.

FCF: How long, on the average, does your tournaments usually run?
BC: Well, we went from my original tournament in April of 99', which had 223 competitors on only 3 rings, ran almost 9 hours, which was just way too long. The Grappler's Quest in March of 2000 had 368 competitors, ran on five rings and took 7 hours. The New York City Grappling Challenge had 300 competitors, which was back in April 29 [of 2000], took like five and a half hours. So, we're getting more efficient every time we run it.

FCF: How do you resolve controversial calls, decisions, or matches?
BC: Big question. I can say first of all, going back from subjective judging to points, eliminated, and I'm going on record to say this, probably 90% of all problems because when points are used, it's very clear on what system of judging is being used. It's very thorough. Basically, everybody's getting a fair deal. Every single judge and every single referee that's on the mat judges the same exact way. Everyone is getting a fair shake and everyone knows that. They also know that these are paid professionals who had to go through training sessions. Immediately, we gained more respect and in the last tournament, out of 300 competitors and probably about 1200 fights, we had only one problem. That was the final match of the day and it was for the championship. There were no points scored. It was one of Renzo Gracie's students versus one of Mario Yamasaki's student. It was two big schools. They are currently number one and two in the rankings for the $10,000 prize [note: yup, that's right the winning team at the end of the year gets a $10,000 prize], and it was a very tough decision to make. The referee came over to me and said, "Brian, there was no points scored. There was one advantage point." I said, "Make the call." He made the call and it was fine.

FCF: Do you rank your fighters?
BC: Competitors that win their division in the previous event get seeded higher, meaning that if we have the opportunity to have a bye, it would be the champion. Also, most competitors, if they win their division, they are recommended by us to go to the next division and most competitors do. We do keep very strict track of our champions and also if a guy or woman wins two tournaments in a row, we usually select them as a Super Fight competitor.

FCF: How do you avoid the common politics between schools that sometimes prevent certain schools from entering in your events?
BC: We do have a couple cases like that and actually, the unfortunate thing was for years there was one particular school that would not compete if another school was involved, whether it be competing or even being in presence there, they would not come. I can say that we are making major progress in eliminating those problems by providing a very unbiased tournament environment. Personally, I don't think a martial arts school should be in charged of running a tournament. I think it leans too much…I know they may have not planned it…it can lead to a very biased tournament environment. I think anyone who reads this statement will agree with me. It's happened numerous times and you see all of a sudden, all the referees are from the same school. It's almost a hostile environment where you feel that you can't get a fair shake. I think that's unfair. What we do to avoid this and bring on the camaraderie to avoid the situation I previously quoted, is select an instructor from every major school and have enrolled them in to our referee program. I know for a fact that Mario Yamasaki has a representative in there. Renzo Gracie has a representative in there, Marcos Santos Machado BJJ, Kioto Jiu-Jitsu.

FCF: Do you feel that the majority of competitors prefer a no-gi type of tournament, which is more Abu Dhabi-like as compared to gi-required tournaments?
BC: I'll be honest with you. I'm not going to be able to answer that until June 18th. I'm going to go on the record to say that before the tournament that we are going to draw more competitors with the gi than without the gi. [note: Kimono Kombat had 340 competitors] I think that's because competitors feel more comfortable in the gi, with the dis-allowing of heel hooks and knee bars and the like. There's schools that I haven't even heard of that's going to send us a 30 person team to our tournament. We're also drawing Sambo and Judo guys that would never compete in a non-gi tournament.

FCF: Tell me how you register these huge amounts of people.
BC: There is something in registration that I do want to highlight. We have four people doing registration at the front desk and we have four people doing weigh-ins with laptops. It's all-digital for efficient registration, weigh-ins, and all that. Everything's very fast. You don't sit in line for hours on end.

FCF: Do the wrestlers with some submission skills tend to dominate due to the fact that they are comfortable without a gi, the takedown experience, and fairly short time limit?
BC: I would say that we have had Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu schools dominate. I think a lot of schools used to train strictly with the gi and what happened was guys were coming in…from what I heard in history, you weren't allowed to take off your gi until you were past blue belt. Is that true?

FCF: I am not sure. I have never heard that. Next time I see Relson [Gracie], I'll ask.
BC: I think what it was is that a lot of wrestlers were coming in the school and working out without their gi on and you have the addition of the Ultimate Fighting Championship where people usually don't wear uniforms and people just starting training without it [the gi or uniform]. Everybody is hybrid these days, cross training, so I don't want to say that wrestlers are better without the gi.

FCF: With all submissions allowed, such as heel hook and neck cranks, have you had any serious injuries?
BC: We have not had any serious injuries to date. That's another thing I can add about the professional referees is that they are trained in resuscitation; also everybody is equipped with a cell phone so they can call 911 right from the mat. I think having professionals there is very important.

FCF: With the popularity of submission wrestling in other countries increasing exponentially, do you have any plans to bring in some Brazilians from Brazil and the Japanese to compete in some of your Superfights?
BC: Sure, absolutely. We actually have plans, this is pretty top secret [another note: not anymore], we have plans to bring the grapplers.com tournament circuit to Brazil, to Japan because of the world interest that we are gaining. I could say that we run the largest amateur submission-grappling event in the world and not be afraid to do so.

FCF: Do you have any Super fights lined up for your next tournament that you would like to share, like a BJ Penn vs. Matt Serra match (hint hint)?
BC: Well, a lot of people are saying that will happen. Matt Serra actually got his black belt, I'm not sure if you heard that. That's something that is off in the future. It will happen. I don't know if it will be under me or somebody else, but I think that fight will happen for us. Both competitors have expressed an interest personally to me to compete at the Grappler's Quest, which is our premier event in a Superfight. So, that may happen this year.

FCF: Have you thought of including NHB type matches in your tournaments?
BC: It sounds like a fantastic idea, but unfortunately, they are not legal. We developed a sport fighting commission and it is just under development right now. Grapplers.com will present the sport fighting commission which will develop this event called sport fights and basically we're trying to get sanctioned in New Jersey, right along with the IFC and we presented it to the athlete commission early last week. So hopefully, if approved, you'll see sport fights in Atlantic City before the end of the year.

FCF: I know that people around the country would love to see videos of your tournaments, especially the Super fights. Do you have any plans to produce highlight tapes of the tournament and include the Super fight matches?
BC: That's what we're working on right now. After this tournament [Kimono Kombat], I actually have a few months off. I will be training myself like an animal as well as producing this tape. I never really had the opportunity to stop and look through tapes and really put together a great highlight video, but I'm sure it will be. It's going to include all our superfights and some highlights from the tournaments itself. It will be on sale on the website probably, I'm guessing, a two months from now, August or so.

FCF: Good luck with your upcoming tournaments.
BC: Thank you.