Kron Gracie suffered his first loss in MMA when he ended up at the wrong side of a dominant decision against MMA veteran  Cub Swanson (26-11 MMA, 11-7 UFC). Kron is now 5-1 MMA, 1-1 UFC.

There was quite a bit of history between the 2 fighters.

Swanson had disclosed that because of Kron’s famous last name, he had received backlash from a few Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academies. Swanson is himself a Rigan Machado black belt but is not training under him anymore. Rigan Machado is a cousin of the Gracies.

Swanson said in a recent episode of UFC Unfiltered (transcript by MMA Junkie):

“I’ve been able to get a lot of jiu-jitsu in because he’s a Gracie, and he has the name. It’s been an interesting one,”. “I’ve been kicked out of a couple of jiu-jitsu schools because of the respect. They don’t want to train somebody that isn’t a Gracie, which really pisses me off.”

Kron was asked that on a recent interview on MMA Junkie and he believes that Swanson should have stayed with his team:

“The way I grew up in training and fighting martial arts is basically you have a clan and a team, and you’re with your team forever. If you leave your team, you’re [a] traitor. That’s the way I grew up. I have this instilled in me, and no matter what’s going on with me or my team, that’s my team. I don’t… get to just pick and choose as I go along with this career, whether it’s jiu-jitsu or whether it’s fighting. In the old times of war, you had a clan, and you can’t just go, ‘I didn’t like this clan this time; I’m going to go somewhere else.”

After his dominating victory over Gracie, MMAFighting asked him if he had something to tell Gracie, to which Swanson answered:

Yeah I think one of the biggest thing is he said that maybe I’m not loyal and in his day, which is old school, is to you stick it out with somebody.  But you know we are now in the era of you gotta learn what everyone knows,  you got to be a student of the game. You got to travel that’s what a real samurai does. So my advice to him is travel. Go be humble. Go out and get as good as possible to train with everybody you know. You stick at one gym you’re not gonna grow so that I you know I feel like he he was wrong in that aspect.