Gabi Garcia has been booked to duel middle aged former pro wrestlers back to back. Yet somehow she feels like she’s a competent commentator on bullying – which is why she was quick to weigh in on Cris Cyborg v Jackson Wink Photographer.
As a reminder Cyborg got called a he after defeating Holm ultimately leading to the ufc revoking the credentials of said gym member.
Garcia was quick to jump to the defense of frequent training partner Cris Cyborg and to weigh in on her own experiences with bullying:
“I’m a person who can speak with authority about it. I was the person who most suffered from bullying in the history of Jiu-Jitsu.” – Gabi told Tatame adding “…there are two sides to bullying … You hide behind it and think, ‘Oh, I’m a poor one, and no one likes me,’ or you look and say, ‘I’m going to train a lot and I’m going to show you these people bullying me that I am not what they think I am, that I am more than they. ‘ Today I look at these people who bully with others, or with me, and I think: who is this person? Because, in fact, bullying is nothing more than a person who does not like himself. Because a person who loses time in social network to curse the other, she has time left over.”
I was very judged. And when you enter into the profile of these people who are bullying the internet, you see how sad these people are, because they would like to be in their place. It is difficult for people to do this, to have the courage to train in pain, to sleep in pain, to wake up in pain, to not know tomorrow, whether you will have a marked fight or not. People only know how to judge. One sentence that I once spoke at the Worlds and that continues in my head is this: ‘Easy is to be the stone, difficult is to be the glass’. So, so you play the stone is a lot easier then what else you have today are the internet fighters. The guy thinks he knows everything about the fight and will be giving his opinion.
On Porfirio and how close the two are:
“About Tayane, I remember the first time they did an assembly of mine and hers. I was already a black belt, she was blue, and they did an assembly saying that she would be the new Gabi Garcia, back then she was not even Alliance. She wrote to me, and from the blue belt, she was going to my house, back in São Paulo.
I started to lose weight and my clothes, from my sister, she was picking up, so much that when she gets here at my house today (in the United States), she picks up some things and uses (laughs). Tayane is a girl that I think should not suffer the bullying that she suffers. I deserved to suffer at one time the bullying that I suffered, because I was not good at Jiu-Jitsu, so people judged my Jiu-Jitsu, and that’s okay. Only Tayane is very good at Jiu-Jitsu, she has a Jiu-Jitsu ahead, she’s flexible … Despite her weight, even scares the way she struggles. She does guard, she passes guard, she has many things I did not have, in the time that I was in Jiu-Jitsu, always fighting. I do not think she’s going to be the new queen of Jiu-Jitsu, she already is.”
Garcia concludes:
“(Family) taught me to love me the way I am. I love myself, I find myself the most beautiful woman in the world, the most sinister in the world, I think so, and that gives me total confidence. You enter the Internet to speak ill of others because you lack self-confidence, because that person does not have the courage to speak it in your face. Behind the keyboard, any kitten becomes a lion”
