If you've gone down the rabbit hole of mma you'd know this is a frequent topic of discussion that resurfaces every couple of years. At one point the jiu-jitsu community agreed that a measure of a blue belt is a person being able to beat - Mike Tyson, a silverback gorilla and a pitbull! Likely not at the same time tho.. Because they kept it realistic!
Mike Tyson was once considered the utmost dangerous man in the world however he personally admitted he watched UFC and believed Royce Gracie could've beaten him. He said as quoted by bjjee.com:
“Well, in ’93, I was in prison, so there wouldn’t have been a fight, but there is no way I would have won. I had no idea what was going on with that type of fighting and would’ve been taken by surprise”, Tyson said.“I would have had to train in that particular art of fighting before that happened. That’s a particular art. You’re not going to go in there with just your hand and not have a great ground game. You also need a great wrestling game to be successful, and you won’t be exciting, as well. You have to have both games. You have to know how to wrestle and box. That’s just the truth.
Tyson admitted that if he had been offered the opportunity to compete in the first tournament (and if he wasn’t in prison) his ego would likely have forced him to accept.
“My ego would have told me I’m the best fighter in the world with all the particular fighting aspects, and I would have tried it.”
Of course Royce Gracie is, and was at the time, long time black belt. A far cry from the average blue belt of today.
When we think about a blue belt there’s a huge gap in time. A blue belt in the early 2000s was very rare and in many academies there were much different promotion practices. Carlson Gracie Sr notably had a very hard core system when it came to assigning rank.
As per his son:
“In my day in order for the guy to get promoted a black belt had to retire. At the blue belt there were several who wanted to be the number 1 blue belt, so the black belt had to retire so that the number 1 brown belt could go to black, in order for the number one purple to go to brown, and for number 1 blue to move to purple.
...It was a very arduous path but also a very serious one, which is why the greatest team of all time emerged. ”
And as for blue belts of today, over at Gracie Barra you can get yours if you only attend twice a week for about a year regardless of your efficiency. For a while there you could also get your blue belt via the internet:
