JRE MMA Show #45 with Justin Wren & Rafael Lovato Jr.

Five, four, three, two, one. Boom, and we're live with my friend, Justin Wren in the house, and one of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet-

(laughs)

... Rafael Lovato.

Absolutely.

Dude, I'm bummed that you're f- I'm happy that you're doing well, but I'm bummed you're fighting for Bellator.

Aw.

I really am, man. I wanna, I wanna commentate your fights. I, I know for a fact that Bellator right now is like, is, is high, it's a higher level than it's ever been before.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, you look at,they've got Mousasi, you, Rory MacDonald, uh, Lima, uh, you know-

Machida's about to fight.

... Paul Daley, Machida. I mean, it's fucking high level now, man. It's like Bellator is, uh, very close to comparable. Still, I would love to see you over in the UFC.

Yeah? Well, we'll see what happens. But right now, I'm, I'm really happy where I'm at.

How old are you now?

I'm 35.

And you d- didn't start MMA until you were, like, 31, 32?

Yes, 31. I was, four, four years ago.

Yeah.

2014 was my first fight.

Were you doing a lot of MMA training before that? Because y- y- when you're, you were ... For people that don't know, you're one of the most accomplished Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts in the world, and when you were competing as, uh, Brazilian jiu-jitsu martial artist, were you training striking? Were you training other things as well?

Well, uh, you know, that's, uh, kind of my life story, I guess. Um, you know, um, uh, my father is a lifetime martial artist, and so I had a whole martial arts upgr- uh, upbringing well before I ever found out about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. My father was a Jeet Kune Do instructor, and so growing up, um, you know, the main thing that we were training in when I was a child was, uh, the Jeet Kune Do system, uh, which was basically mixed martial arts before mixed martial arts. You know, uh, Bruce Lee's philosophy was way ahead of his time. He believed in, um, you know, learning from all the arts and creating your own personal system of self-defense, um, that involved, you know, each range of combat. And so, you know, I grew up doing, uh, several different forms of martial arts, um, uh, boxing, Muay Thai, Escrima, Wing Chun, Penjak Silat. I mean, you name it, I've probably done it. And when my father discovered Brazilian jiu-jitsu, uh, I was an early teenager, like around 12 years old. He learned about Brazilian jiu-jitsu in one of the Jeet Kune Do instructor conferences that takes place in California. They brought in the Gracies. Um, they had, you know, they did, like, shoot fighting and different sort of, you know, martial arts incl- that included grappling, uh, but it was very, you know, rough and not n- near the, th- the technique that, that Brazilian jiu-jitsu has. Uh, so whenever he first started learning Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he fell in love with it. My dad's a s- a smaller guy. Uh, at that time, he was probably, like, 145, 150 pounds, and so it was perfect for him, and he fell in love with it, and he comes home and he starts telling me about Brazilian jiu-jitsu and teaching me what he learned. Um, and we lived in Oklahoma, and the instructor conference was in California. At that time, basically the only jiu-jitsu was in California, maybe a little bit in Florida, and then Renzo was in New York. So everything was as far as possible from us because we were right there in the middle of the country. And, you know, he fell in love with Brazilian jiu-jitsu and so he started making trips to California to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I was just a teenager. I'm a young kid, so, you know, I was already, uh, doing some boxing at the time. Uh, I was competing in amateur boxing, and I'm, I'm used to training with adults, and once I started learning Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you know, i- I fell in love with it right away because that gave me something that I could do where I could be competitive with the adults right away. You know? I was a long, lanky kid, um, and the guard just, you know, felt natural to me, and just being on the ground, I really loved it and I loved that the, the technique of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, how, how technical it was and, and the science of it. Um, so I fell in love with it right away, and I mean, uh, we, we sacrificed a lot to learn jiu-jitsu being in Oklahoma. Um, always traveled, uh, to learn. The first time I went to Brazil I was 16 years old.