Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Wrestling World Championship and the Sheikhs who run it by Greg Mansfield

By Greg Mansfield

gnm29scarletmail.rutgers.edu

Being tired sucks when you have someone on top of you. Exhausted from your previous 4 minutes of fighting, you try desperately to buck the person that is in full mount off of you. No matter how much you try to offset their balance, they seem glued to your torso. Every breath you take in is hindered by your 200 pound opponent tightly framed to your chest, and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to take in oxygen the more you exert yourself trying to get out of this position. As you try every technique you know to get him off of you, your foe quickly grabs one of your arms and pulls it toward himself. Before you can react to this, he shoves one of his legs across your face and moves the other leg just below your armpit and falls away from your body with your arm held tightly with both hands. You try desperately to grab for your arm that he has taken, but it’s too late.

Your opponent has already fallen to the mat with your arm and is cranking all his weight on it, pulling your forearm away from your elbow. You feel the sharp, unmistakable pain of your elbow hyperextending and your arm muscles beginning to tear. In order to save your arm from breaking, you have no choice but to tap your opponent, signifying an end to the match and admitting defeat. You just got armbarred. As you shake your opponent's hand and congratulate him on his performance, you realize that you travelled all the way to The United Arab Emirates just to almost get your arm broken in half.   

Stories like these are a dime a dozen in the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) Submission Wrestling World Championship. You may be wondering what this long chain of words means. Most likely your high school had a wrestling team. ADCC is essentially wrestling, but instead of two guys trying to pin each other, they’re trying to either choke their opponent unconscious or break one of their limbs. ADCC was started in 1998 when Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan [1] decided that martial arts in general were not very well represented in the Middle East, despite the Middle East’s long history of grappling and wrestling [2]. Sheikh Tahnoon, the half-brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and a big supporter of wearing sunglasses indoors [3], had been training all different kinds of mixed martial and decided, and decided to create “a standard for which all ground fighting martial arts would be measured” in his home country of the United Arab Emirates. Now I don’t want you thinking this was some kind of start up business that took off through the hard work and dedication of the Sheikh Tahnoon, it’s important to keep in mind that the Sheikh is exorbitantly rich. This whole competition is almost completely funded by Sheikh Tahnoon, and a lot of money is pumped into ADCC to make sure it goes smoothly. Tournament winners are paid very well and the world’s best mixed martial artists are flown in around the world to compete in the tournament. The ADCC definitely brings in business and attention to the good parts of the Middle East (although in the last couple of years the tournament has been held out of the UAE in other no Middle Eastern countries). The Sheikh uses his money for what is a good cause, which could not be said for every Sheikh out there.

[1]Shiekh Tahnoon congratulating a competitor

[2] three Persian wrestlers posing for the camera c.1890

[3] Shiekh Tahnoon strangely never seen indoors without sunglasses

I would like to preface the next two stories by saying I have no idea about the validity of them. I had a chance in to sit down with my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu coach, who has competed in ADCC in the past. Unfortunately I was not in the correct environment to record my conversation with him (I was talking to him in between sparring rounds), but I asked him if he could tell me any good stories about ADCC. He told me that the actual competition itself was pretty standard, the only difference being that it focused a little more on wrestling and a little less on submissions. He did tell me a few interesting stories about the Sheikh Tahnoon, and about another Sheikh who’s name he didn’t know. I didn’t really intended for my narrative to take this direction, but these stories are pretty interesting and I felt they were worth writing about. The first story I was told was about a Sheikh who did not use his money constructively like Sheikh Tahnoon did. Evidently, what this Sheikh did for fun was pick up a bunch of prostitutes and bring them on his giant yacht to party with them. The Sheikh would get drunk with the girls, and midway through partying with them, get very enraged. He would then take one of the girls he was partying with, and throw her off the side of the boat. The Sheikh would then refuse to let her back into the boat, and since he took the yacht out to waters far away from shore, the girl would have no place to swim. Eventually the girl would get too tired and would end up drowning as the Sheikh watched her die. He would do this a lot, but eventually the girls started washing up on international waters, and these countries started to investigate what was happening. These countries eventually caught on to what the Sheikh was doing, so he took a 6 month vacation, and when he returned he was no longer being investigated for those murders. The person I interviewed told me this story and then said “When you’re poor it’s called murder, when you’re rich it’s called fun”.

The other story I was told has a little bit more to do with ADCC, and is about Sheikh Tahnoon himself. Once again, this is all alleged and hearsay. Sheikh Tahnoon would pay very high level grapplers and mixed martial arts competitors $40,000 to fly to the United Arab Emirates and grapple with him [4]. When the competitors arrived there, they were told that under no circumstances should they submit the Sheikh. It was implied that if they did, they would get kicked out of the country and wouldn’t get paid. Basically, they were all flown out to the Sheikh in order for him to submit them and inflate his own ego. Apparently the Sheikh would do this for many different kinds of sports. He would fly professional tennis players out to his expensive mansion to play a match against him, and hire refs who would make calls in his favor to ensure that he would beat the professionals. While not the most admirable way to use your money, it’s definitely better than using it to throw prostitutes off boats.

[4] Shiekh Tahnoon bringing Jiu Jitsu competitior to his private dojo to train against.

That story aside, Sheikh Tahnoon has done a lot for the grappling arts in the Middle East and around the world. His competition provides an outlet where grapplers can be paid a lot to show off their talent and be seen on an international level. ADCC continues the rich history the Middle East has with combat grappling and connects this history with the rest of the world.