This story appears in our Spring 2026 issue, on newsstands April 14th. Want us to come to your place? Order the issue here to get it delivered to your door, or become a member to get digital access to the issue and early access to paywalled content.

It wouldn’t seem like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or BJJ for short, is in need of any saving. The martial art, developed in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s, is one of the fastest growing hobbies in the United States and the go-to get-ripped-quick activity of men like Tom Hardy (very cool) and Mark Zuckerberg (very rich). Supermodel Gisele Bündchen left quarterback Tom Brady and ran into the waiting arms of Joaquim Valente, her Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor. Meanwhile, the UFC, a sporting league built on the skills of BJJ icons such as Royce and Renzo Gracie, just signed a $7.7 billion distribution deal with Paramount+. A chicken in every pot; a blood-splattered Octagon on every screen.

And yet, here’s Craig Jones, a 34-year-old Australian, in a pink beanie, hot pink sunglasses, and a tank top, sitting by the side of the road somewhere outside Adelaide, Australia, musing over Zoom on how to save the sport. Jones, fresh off coaching UFC champion Alexander Volkanovski to his 28th victory, sits just off the pinnacle of jiu-jitsu. He is great but not the greatest. He has placed second in the ADCC World Championship, one of the sport’s biggest competitions, but never first. But such is the man’s marketing genius that he has turned his silver finish into gold.

“I always built upon the idea that if you claim to be the best, people will argue with you all day,” he explains. “But if you claim to be second best, no one argues. No one’s vying for that title.” He even named his team B-Team Jiu Jitsu; its motto is “When you can’t train with the A-team, you get the B-team.”

According to Jones, jiu-jitsu is just too damn boring to watch as a sport. It’s true: Even at its highest level—in fact, more often at its highest level—BJJ is caught in Timidsville. Though there are thousands of local competitions across the country, covering the floors of YMCAs and college gymnasiums with tatami mats, notably absent are stands full of fans. “No one who doesn’t do jiu-jitsu watches jiu-jitsu,” bemoans Jones. Though nominally a contest of skill and athleticism wrought through bodily harm and the wrenching of joints and choking of necks, matches can be stultifyingly dull. Many resemble horseshoe crabs fighting or tortoises making love.

More seriously, as a culture, BJJ is deeply toxic. “Jiu-jitsu is very macho, very homophobic, very misogynistic,” Jones says. In the last few months, the sport has been contorted in allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Well-known (relatively speaking) competitors like André Galvão and Izaak Michell have been accused of sexual assault (both have denied the allegations). After years of silence, many female athletes are coming forward with harrowing accounts of abuse.

“Jiu-jitsu has its own #MeToo movement going right now,” explains Jones, much of it instigated by his own relentless calling-out of offenders on Instagram.

Overall, the sport has also taken a decidedly right-wing shift. Always popular with disproportionately conservative demographics, like the police and military, MMA—and BJJ with it—has been ingested into the slip-stream of manosphere icons Joe Rogan, Jake Shields, and Lex Fridman and spat back out as right-wing agitprop. In 2019, when Trump appeared at a UFC fight at Madison Square Garden, he was roundly booed. This year, UFC CEO Dana White is hosting a fight at the White House. Jones is aghast. “My goal really is to shift the entire culture, to grow the sport of jiu-jitsu at the elite competition level and also at a grassroots level.” His strategy? Burn it all down and start again.

Jones is an unlikely savior. A cursory search of his Instagram—where he has more than 700,000 followers—features him in various and sundry louche activities. “I’m a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson,” he says. In many posts, his hair is dyed Easter egg pink and his smile shimmers with gold teeth. He often appears only in briefs, revealing tattoos that include, among other things, a portrait of Sade on one arm and the BET logo on his rib cage. One picture shows him receiving a four-handed massage in Thailand; in another, he’s grinning beside the fearsome leader of the Rebels, Australia’s most infamous outlaw motorcycle gang; still another has him brandishing a bazooka next to what looks like a giant can of Zyns in a desert somewhere in the middle of the night. Despite all this, those close to him say he’s a sweetheart. “There is no better friend,” says Seth Belisle, his business partner, but then adds, “no worse enemy.” Jones’s presence may be outrageous. But outrage, he suggests, is just what jiu-jitsu needs.

When it comes to spectacle, mankind runs toward the most violent. It’s hard to imagine Romans flocking to the Coliseum if Christians were only lightly mauled by lions or flung into a pit with rabbits. The UFC, which was founded in 1993, offers all-out, anything-goes brawls, endless barrages of elbows and knees, more blood than a Monty Python sketch. But BJJ has none of the elemental drama that makes other combat sports compulsively watchable. There’s no striking and little blood. At its highest level, jiu-jitsu is a game of millimeters. One of the most effective techniques—and a Jones specialty—is a heel hook, which uses the heel as a lever to torque the knee, ripping the ACL, MCL, and meniscus to shreds. It’s far more devastating than a punch in the face but, from a few feet away, just looks like a guy hugging some other guy’s foot.

So while BJJ tournaments and participation are sharply increasing, audiences aren’t. “I’ve lost so many girlfriends by dragging them to watch guys in pajamas wrestle for eight hours,” says Jones. But he has hope. “I always think about cricket. If people can watch three days of fucking cricket and enjoy it, they can watch anything. So if jiu-jitsu is such a popular participant sport, how do we make it a popular spectator sport?”

Jones has a few tricks up his sleeve. His first answer is to create personalities. Big, outrageous personalities like his that border on satire and perhaps are. (Hence the bazooka and the bong and a long list of outré Instagram posts.) Personalities that hate one another, cause drama, and drive eyeballs. Jones’s nemesis, for instance, is Gordon Ryan, a former teammate, now ranked No. 1, who happens to have beaten Jones in each of their three fights. “I genuinely do not like him,” admits Jones. “He’s a classic right-wing grifter.” If the sport can’t become more violent, then at least the narratives between its competitors can become more dramatic. “I want to try to do to jiu-jitsu what Bourdain did to food,” says Jones, “where he made the focus of the show more about the individuals in the community rather than the food itself.”

Jones’s other gambit is to make jiu-jitsu competition more thrilling to watch. In 2024 he and Belisle launched CJI—Craig Jones Invitational—a new sort of tournament with a $1 million prize for the winner. (The purses of other promotions like the ADCC, Abu Dhabi Combat Club, and IBJJF, International Braziian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, top out at somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000.) From a promotion called Karate Combat, he borrowed the idea of a pit, so fighting never ceases. From the WWE, he borrowed bizarro entrances; from the early UFC (and tennis circa 1973), novelty matches. In the sold-out inaugural event in Las Vegas, he entered the ring wearing a bulletproof vest and a white beret. He swigged some Macallan scotch then ripped off his camouflage pants to reveal a rainbow bikini bottom. His opponent was six-foot-two Brazilian phenom Gabi Garcia, who he relentlessly razzed for days leading up to the competition. (He won via rear naked choke.) Garcia had no hard feelings. “I am very thankful for Craig,” she says. “After we fought, people stopped me to take pictures when I went to Target, people who don’t train. That’s never happened to me.” CJI, Jones says, had 65 million views across all platforms, making it one of BJJ’s most watched events. More importantly, he forced a larger conversation on athlete pay in rival promotions.

“We’ve tricked a conservative group of people into labor rights,” he says triumphantly. “You got to trick the red-pill dudes,” Jones explains. “I try to blend in a bit with that community and change the culture as best I can. The problem is if I satirize a misogynistic jiu-jitsu identity too well, there’ll be a certain group, maybe 5 to 10 percent, that’ll be like, ‘Hell yeah, fuck women!’ The danger of satire is if you pull it off too well, both sides find it funny.”

Jones’s crusade goes beyond needling one man or promoting one competition. He wants to take down the entire structure of the sport. “There’s the ancient martial arts hierarchy, which attributes morality to belt level. But at the end of the day, we’re just wrestling other dudes. We’re doing adult karate,” he says. His sacrilege is the point. “I find martial arts a bit silly. I can’t really attack it directly, but if I can use my position in the sport to poke fun at these guys, maybe they won’t be held in such esteem and have so much power.” He pauses and smiles slightly, revealing a glistering gold tooth. “Power doesn’t really corrupt, but it reveals who people really are.”