The rivalry between Craig Jones and Gordon Ryan is probably the most famous in the world of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and certainly the one that has produced the most discourse within the subculture. The two had previously been teammates in John Danaher’s legendary Danaher Death Squad and, for more or less mysterious reasons, parted ways. Jones created his own club, taking some of the members (including Ryan’s brother, Nicky) with him.

Gordon F. Ryan III is a titan. Standing at 6’2” and competing in the heavier weight divisions, he holds an outstanding 96/5 win/loss ratio. Systematic, logical, disciplined, he is a genius on the mats and a ruthless grappler. Browse any of his Instagram posts or purchase any of his instructionals and you will see a probing and profound knowledge of the sport. At 29 years old, he is already one of the most successful grapplers in history and, by way of his videos, one of the wealthiest. In his spare time, Ryan boasts of these achievements—loudly—and has made a reputation for himself as the GOAT, “The King,” a shit-talking superstar who always puts his money where his mouth is.

Craig Jones’s career, meanwhile, has been more versatile. Fighting out of the B-Team HQ in Austin (the “second best Jiu-Jitsu academy in the world”—a nod to the infamous split), he has cornered UFC great and fellow countryman Alexander Volkanovski in his run to defeat the seemingly unbeatable Dagestani grapplers, travelled the world for his “Parts Unblown” web series, taught seminars, and released innuendo-laden instructionals. The Australian’s laid-back attitude and talent for banter have made him an internet favorite and a regular on podcasts. As far as the numbers go, Jones has lost twice to Gordon Ryan, and Ryan has gone on to be the undefeated king of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

That could have been the end of it and Jones could have receded into second place, never being seen as more than a resentful troll with a loyal following. But with the announcement of the inaugural Craig Jones Invitational Tournament this year, Jones upset the balance of the Jiu-Jitsu world, continuing to act as the thorn in Ryan’s side. Scheduled the same weekend as the legacy Abu Dhabi Combat Club tournament, Jones’s stunt became a continual PR disaster for the ADCC organizers as more pranks, leaked DMs, and grapplers poached from the stingy tournament for the better-paying CJI dominated headlines, dragging Ryan, loyal to the competition he would later win, down with it.

Readers of MAN’S WORLD will certainly recognize this pattern: an underdog uses memes, shock humor, and effective political maneuvering to punch above his weight class, challenge institutional players, and humiliate his scoffing opponents along the way. But if we set aside the politics of athlete pay or PR management and instead study the character of these two men, a more fundamental opposition is at work. I insist that we look past the sheer objectivity of The King’s win/loss ratio. There’s no doubt he’s the greatest of all time, but if you get caught up in that exclusively, you miss out on the questions of culture and, with time, legacy.

What makes Ryan such an easy target for ridicule? Why do his achievements fail to free him of his trolls? Doesn’t Ryan always look a little fruity? Posing with a crown and cape, or standing next to an expensive car and a hot model? Doesn’t his voice sound a little too soft and lispy to be talking all this game about being a manly man who’ll fuck your girlfriend? He advertised his thousand-dollar flip flop companies with big titty bimbos stepping out of hot cars—how is that not the biggest cope possible? What is he doing fighting losers in the comments? The bluster never works in his favor and I can’t imagine he will ever recover his image from the constant ridicule BJJ fans are putting him through. He’s unable to take banter and send it back: He’s cringe, insecure, compensating. To make matters worse, Gordon Ryan notoriously spent years suffering from bowel issues, an ironic detail that parallel’s Nietzsche’s comments about the Germans. His health would return but the tummy-ache mindset never leaves him. Gordon Ryan, for all the cowboy hats, Cybertruck-posting, and Trump support, is a fundamentally serious person with an upset stomach.

How do you squander greatness? You hold onto it too tightly. The world we share is a great muscular man pinning us down with all his strength, fat but strong. Don’t you feel the great serious weight of the world suffocating you? Ryan is the typical conservative. Heavy with tradition and excellent training, his instincts are serious and lumbering, always defending institutions that have long since lost their mandate. We are not conservatives.

We are constantly berated online over what constitutes a Nietzschean: Are Jihadis Nietzschean? Or how about some rapper? Surely the KIA boys are what Nietzsche dreamt of in his Genoan villa. But it’s all some version of idiot, retard, terrorist: people too stupid to be serious or too serious to be free. In Jones you find the seeds of this spirit, not the Overman yet, but the European man gone under. Too many in our sphere won’t be convinced. This is because there will always be a fundamental rift between the Nietzschean and the Conservative, who cries “degeneracy!” at the cocaine, Thai ladyboys, or superfight against a gigantic woman at the CJI—Jones seems uniquely drawn to upsetting the norms of good Texas boys and their Brazilian counterparts. Jones sells sunglasses that have coke spoons in the stem and rash guards that read “Keep Jiu-Jitsu Gay” (a long-running meme in the sport), a far cry from the veteran-owned coffee vendors and thousand-dollar flip-flop shops. Contemporary Conservatives are ascendant when things start to go badly and dominant when it’s already over. You’ll sooner find the next great men in the UK or its colonies than the US; patriots don’t grasp that. We’re approaching the Austrian-painter-as-homeless-vagabond era, though you wish we were further along that particular path. Superficial orthodoxies can be shed easily; what is enduring and useful to us is the contrast in instinct, which couldn’t be broader. With Ryan there is no doubt that some kind of heaviness follows him around. Frankly, he’s just a little too butthurt to make any of his posturing believable.

Readers of Nietzsche will have to come to terms with the very real possibility that the Next Great Nietzscheans might not even be familiar with his writing. We will find them training, aligning their instincts with their intellect. Such a union frees the European man, a real freedom that could move culture in some kind of new direction instead of nowhere at all. Jones may not be everything we want, but his appearance in history is a very good sign that more men like him are coming. Free, wandering men, strong, violent, but most of all unwilling to be serious, to be bogged down by demonstrations of petty nationalisms, tasteless displays of wealth, or even the kind of retarded David Goggins-brained training mentality that destroys the body to demonstrate the supremacy of the mind. One could easily picture David Goggins as an ascetic loitering in some smelly temple, or as your least favorite coworker hustling for the next meagre promotion, or self-immolating for a very serious and important cause. This has always been our enemy.

Jones could never take on Danaher’s requirement for constant training, every day of the year. The desire for rest, leisure, and travel have always compelled him, to the detriment of his win streak & that conservative God, “discipline.” Ryan’s opponent, his nemesis, ever returning to troll and to deflate, is our man. The breadth of his spirit and desire for adventure takes him around the world. He would sooner be a grappling vagabond than attend an inauguration. This is our man. Nietzsche would have known to look, all these years later, to the men who have gone under. In Jones we find the rare instance of a man who has achieved the seemingly impossible and deeply admirable task of making everything he does a part of his game. And his game, if you’re wondering, is slippery, wily, always ready for a joke, and extremely dangerous.

In a famous instance he explains to Lex Fridman (the epitome of the self-serious grappler) that having sensed a Ukrainian seminar attendee was trying to turn a friendly roll into a death match for some unearned glory, he proceeded to break his leg. That’s the kind of seriousness I’m looking for: don’t fuck with my playfulness. This is a fundamental weakness of the Conservative in spirit: playfulness is either clumsy when attempted (just take a look at any of Ryan’s “memes” on Instagram; he posts like a boomer) or simply impossible. Like in the case of the Ukrainian grappler, the single-minded pursuit of winning, especially to beat the man who came to teach a seminar, narrows your horizon and weighs your actions down, making them forceful, clumsy, constipated.

Fighters have never been the thinking type. The best you can get is Georges St-Pierre’s (also a former student of Danaher’s) endearing curiosity about dinosaurs and UFOs or the persistent trend of flat-earthers in the MMA/BJJ world. Danaher has a PhD in epistemology and once taught at Columbia, yet the sport seems no more enriched philosophically by his presence. What our sphere misses in the athlete is the genius they exhibit bodily. Jones won’t pen a treatise, nor will he weigh in on the current discourse, and he’s much better off for it. David Foster Wallace lamented in his review of junior tennis phenom Tracy Austin’s autobiography that athletes, though they exhibit a type of genius, can’t express this genius in words. He saw this as a bad thing and so do most of us, which is a grave mistake.

The BJJ fighter is an artist. Martial arts are criminally under-discussed among those who believe art belongs to the Right—is it our most glaring and most embarrassing defect? Sport culture, competitive culture, especially combat, permeated the thinking of the Greeks. Nietzsche wrote about this early on, but not much more. Training for combat is not mere war readiness: it is a fusion of play, danger, and immediate expression. Its purity expands our conceptual horizon beyond the rational, beyond possession of the good argument. To his credit, Ryan remains the undefeated king. Who you and I share as enemies, however, are stupider, heavier, and far less skilled. We don’t defeat the big lumbering system by respecting the rules harder than they do: we defeat it by keeping the gay science gay.