Oliver Taza, a prominent grappler and dedicated student of John Danaher, recently delved into one topic he is convinced all professional grapplers should take into account…
The process of gauging whether to sign exclusive contracts.

Reflecting on his dealings with signing the contract with ONE Championship, he shared concerns about the timing and terms of their offers:

They’re like: “Oh, well, you can’t fight anywhere else…”

And then the timing of it was weird.
Like, they were hitting me up two weeks before the match where I had to go to Asia.

Let’s say the match doesn’t go my way, now I’m stuck.
You guys are not going to be down to get me a match because I didn’t put on the best performance.

Over the past two years, ONE Championship has approached Taza multiple times, initially through Leo Vieira and later through Tom DeBlass.

Taza revealed he was once offered a matchup against ONE FC champion Tye Ruotolo on only two weeks’ notice – an undeniably difficult situation:

I’m learning how to pick my shots.
We talk about it, but it also taught me to go over a contract, like actually hitting up a lawyer.

Because Jiu-Jitsu guys, you know, we don’t see it – we don’t look at it in a professional way, let’s say, as an MMA fighter would.
And I feel it’s good. It’s taking it in that direction.

It’s not something we usually think of, but it’s good because it’s going to teach grapplers more about being athletes, being professionals.
The sport is still pretty amateur – not as much as five years ago.