Evans: Blackzilians camp is 'fragmented'
One of MMA's most renowned camps is on its last legs.
Rashad Evans aired out the Blackzilians' dirty laundry in a Monday appearance on Ariel Helwani's "The MMA Hour," revealing a growing rift between team heads Glenn Robinson and Henri Hooft has split the Florida-based gym into two separate contingents.
"The truth of the matter is, the team is splintered, the team is fragmented," Evans said, according to MMAFighting's Chuck Mindenhall. "It just became a very hard thing for Glenn to kind of keep his grasp as far as keeping everyone together. Henri (Hooft) wanted to throw his brand into his own thing and it just wasn't matching up with where Glenn wanted to go. That's part of the fragment, but another part of it was that we didn't have a gym anymore.
"Our gym was sold, and Glenn was supposed to build another gym and I guess they moved into a temporary gym. There was some kind of falling-out with the temporary gym, so then part of the team stayed at the temporary gym and more than half of the team went with Henri. I was one of those guys that went with Henri."
Hooft, a Dutch kickboxing guru, took to Instagram to make his departure from the team official moments after Evans' revelation. The striking coach helped run the team from its 2010 inception. He took longtime members Evans, Anthony Johnson, Michael Johnson, Kamaru Usman, and Gilbert Burns with him to his new gym - named the Combat Club and located a hop, skip, and a jump north of the gym the remaining Blackzilians call home.
Aggravating the fallout was the team's relentless gossip mill, which "Suga" claims became a nuisance during his training. Evans eventually grew tired of putting out fires and kept appearances at the dissolving gym to a minimum during his latest camp.
The former UFC light heavyweight champ ultimately admitted the team he played a role in building was a shell of its former self, but refrained from definitively stating the Blackzilians were no longer a unit.
"Now, the state of the Blackzilians … I guess there really is no Blackzilians. It's all in the namesake, but for the most part everybody - or most of the people who was training with the Blackzilians - we're still training together," Evans said.
"I don't want to say it's not a thing anymore. I don't want to put the stamp on it to say it's not a thing anymore. But, I mean, it's definitely not what it used to be."