In an unexpected and touching scene, Checkmat founder Leo Vieira has his 5th degree BJJ black belt tied by his professor, master Romero “Jacare” Cavalcanti of Alliance, at the Evexia Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.
his is a huge thing as in the early 2000’s, there was a controversial moment in Jiu-jitsu history when Leo Vieira left team Alliance along with most of the black belts and which led to the creation of some the most successful BJJ teams today such as Checkmat and Atos.
The most successful Jiu Jitsu team in recent history, Alliance Jiu-Jitsu has 11 successive World team titles (from 2008 to 2016) as well as in 1990’s (98 & 99). In the early 2000’s the team suffered from internal turmoil as many competitors wanted to compete in world championship tournament (different federation than IBJJF) that paid cash money. Gurgel, Jacare and Paiva forbade them to participate and as result, most of it’s competitors left to form rival smaller teams. Brasa and TT were born which later led to further break ups with the forming of Atos and Checkmat. Alliance had some hard times in the next few years but with the guidance of the “General” Fabio Gurgel in Sao Paulo, Alexandre Paiva in Rio de Janiro and Romero Cavalcanti in the US they were able to rise from the ashes.
Legends of Jiu-Jitsu gave free seminars during the 2016 world masters. Watch for free:
Watch: Free Seminars With Leo Vieira, Travis Stevens, Xande, Gurgel…@2016 World Masters
Leo Vieira was expelled from Alliance
One of the 3 Alliance founders, Fabio Gurgel notably a few years a go said about the incident:
Leozinho (Leo Vieira) was convincing the blakc belts to move and make another group. It was a big split. We lost all the black belts we had. It was a really sad moment for the team, but we learned. After that we didn’t lose any. We now have top athletes, better than the ones at the time and everyone is happy. We built a team much stronger than we were in the past.
On What the ones that had left did afterwards;
They couldn’t make it happen again. They left the team but they didn’t build anything that people could admire.
It’s good to see that Vieira and Jacare have made peace:
